Azimuth is an installation art piece on the Allegheny River. I'm going to share with you some of the pictures I took leading up to the experience in the hopes that they will tantalize you, but if you're the sort of person (like me) who likes to go into things completely blind on the trust of a friend or blog that it will be well worth your time:
Go see it.
Otherwise, read on, and then go see it.
On foot, you pad tenuously down a flight of stairs peeling off the right bank of the 40th Street Bridge, down away from the stressful currents of cars whizzing past you from Butler Street to the onramp.
Things look very different.
As you approach the entrance, you already feel the beginnings of being transported to another land.
The desk attendant directs you down a narrow path to the dock. At this point, I was already sure I had made the right decision in coming to this. My soul felt like it had found something critical to its flourishing that I hadn't even realized it was missing.
And that was before I even got to the river, much less the art itself (though arguably, this is
all part of the art. In the words of Strata,
you are in the experience now).
I recommend going at twilight. My friends and I had the 7pm slot. As we approached the river, it looked like this.
This is just a ten minute walk away from the shops and traffic of Butler Street. Why don't I come down here all the time?
After all was said and done, though, I'd actually recommend the 6:30 slot. You'll likely get more out of the installation piece itself.
The boat approaches.
...and we're off.
There are a few more photos, more spoilers, over on my
flickr set, but I won't post them here.
You should (as per the website instructions) wear shoes that won't mind getting a little wet, clothes that won't mind a scuff of dirt, and ideally not be carrying much on your person, though a small bag can be left in the boat without worry.
What I love about this piece is how totally separate it feels from our city, yet also somehow
inherently arisen from it; i.e. no other place could have been the seeding ground for quite this experience. It takes you to somehow a perfect distillation of the beauty of Pittsburgh, yet the fictional layer, "Azimuth", is also completely plausible, and in the heart of the art, the isolation from specificity of place is total.
I also mused to my friends (a grad student and software engineer) that I think doing things like this is critically important for us,
especially as people for whom art and fiction aren't part of what we're paid for. Sure, at the beginning of the Ph.D. they have The Grown Ups tell us that seeing concerts and art shows and other "culture" is
good for us, like eating our vegetables, and somehow it's easy to develop this sense that the sort of person who actually does this stuff is just trying to suck up to some abstract notion of "well-roundedness" -- and I have, on a few occasions, roamed around an uninspiring gallery, thinking to myself,
gee, I'm so well-rounded for looking at art, but, gosh, this is boring.
And then I do something like Azimuth (or Strata, which I wish was still running so I could encourage you to go, but I may still do a post on it) and it reminds me about being human. After two full days of a particularly harrowing stretch of pulling myself out of a research slump, this somehow... revitalized me. Reinspired me, despite (or perhaps due to) having nothing whatsoever to the kind of work I do. It took me out of everything, then put me back, recentered.
Go see Azimuth.
