MTA Arts & Design<\/a>, the agency’s in-house arts agency.<\/p>\nBass said the work, which is made up of 24 poetic announcements delivered in six languages, is meant to gently interrupt daily life.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese announcements ask you to consider the space around you, the people around you, and your own emotional state a little bit differently,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s my hope that this project actually gives people back a little bit of their interior life in public space.\u201d<\/p>\n
The project runs through Oct. 5 and coincides with MTA Arts & Design’s 40th anniversary. The stations were selected both for their sound systems and layouts, with the project prioritizing spaces where riders have room to listen, walk and maybe reflect.<\/p>\n
Most of the announcements are around 30 seconds long. Some are voiced by professional actors, and others by everyday New Yorkers whom Bass recruited through a grassroots casting process. Some announcements sound like poetry, while some sound like overhearing a conversation. Some are personal stories.<\/p>\n
Bass said participants speaking Spanish, Arabic, Bangla, Haitian Creole and Mandarin Chinese all had the opportunity to adapt the translations to the nuances of their own language. She described herself as a \u201csuper New Yorker\u201d whose family has been in the city for four generations on her father\u2019s side, and whose mother emigrated from Trinidad.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy family\u2019s older than the subway,\u201d Bass said. \u201cThe New York City subway is 1904. There are definitely people in my family who were born in New York in the late 1860s.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea for the piece came out of a longstanding dream Bass said she shared with Creative Time. The organization approached her in 2023 about a collaboration that would involve taking over the MTA’s public announcement system.<\/p>\n
To her surprise, no one said no \u2014 though the process involved years of negotiations between the arts, communications and technical departments of the MTA, she said. Bass added that she spent a day in the MTA\u2019s audio system control room, where the agency tests announcements on every type of speaker used in the system.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo one has ever done this before, so that has been a large process of education for all of us, including for the MTA itself,” she said.<\/p>\n
To launch the piece, Bass is staging a live performance at Fulton Center on Wednesday, with 10 performers scattered throughout the station\u2019s atrium. It\u2019s the only time the full sequence of announcements will be presented in order. The work will then live in fragments, driving in and out of the daily commute.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the people who catch it, it\u2019ll feel, hopefully, like a secret that they\u2019re holding,\u201d Bass said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Yorkers passing through the subways starting Wednesday may notice something unfamiliar in the air: a voice that…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":198315,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-198314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-newyork","12":"tag-newyorkcity","13":"tag-ny","14":"tag-nyc","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115143483356689699","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}