Douglas Henderson ::: Icebreaker

recently installed at Long Island University’s Downtown Brooklyn Campus, Icebreaker is a five-channel site work in a large pedestrian tunnel. Sounds of ice melting, cracking, dripping, gusts of freezer air and refrigerator doors opening undulate through the space. The unusual acoustic qualities of the tunnel, which includes a glass wall 120 feet long and 23 feet high (37m x 7m), are used to project and reflect dimensional sound images, creating a panoramic vista on the glass wall as well as waves of iced air washing back and forth through the tunnel. The piece transforms a static space into a mobile one, and develops, through sound, an oasis of cold in the midst of the downtown summer heat. It is also a meditation on the sounds that predominantly and globally will accompany all of us for the rest of our lives: the polar ice caps and glaciers are melting, and Icebreaker serves up a warning.