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Listening, or not The photo is from Speranza's video. Artist explores life within triangle of body, technology, art By BILL VARBLE Don't miss it What : "The Listening Project," an art installation by Carolyn Speranza Where : Schneider Museum of Art at SOU When : 5:30 tonight -- gallery talk with the artist at the museum. 6-8 tonight -- opening reception following artist's talk. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturday -- "Listen to the Body," a workshop with Speranza and Fern Snogren. Explores 20th-century lifestyles and health. Cost is $40. Call 552-6331. Carolyn P. Speranza is interested in listening. Who and what we listen to, or don't. Listening to the body, or the mind. The listening of ourselves, of others. So the Pittsburgh, Pa., artist has created "The Listening Project," two room-size, multimedia art installations about mind-body disorientation in the information age. The project connects themes of listening to questions about health in the information age. The show opens this evening at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University. A related workshop is set for Saturday. "I see two trends," Speranza says on a day when workmen are busy transforming exhibit spaces at the Schneider into walk-in "rooms" for the exhibit. "One is computers and the Internet and technology. The other is that folks are thinking more about health in terms of wellness, not just the absence of disease." You could consider the theoretical space of the exhibit as a triangle, she says. "The body is at one point of the triangle, technology at another, art at the other. I'm interested in what's in between." The installation in the first "room" -- they've constructed 12-foot walls to house it -- is called "Shabad." The room -- and everything in it, working together -- explores the body's response to the quieting of the mind, much like what happens in meditation, when as Speranza puts it, we "short-circuit the prattling on our interior intercom." So then what does the body listen to? In Sanskrit, the name of the inner sound of the spirit is "shabad," Speranza says. Visitors will hear a collage of digitized voices coming from speakers in the walls as they enter -- what Speranza calls "universal self-talk" -- or inner brain chatter. Just ahead an image appears on a projection screen. It's a woman scratching her chest, and it sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. Photo by Jim Craven Artist Carolyn P. Speranza stands at the entrance to her exhibit, under construction Wednesday at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University. The exhibit, which opens tonight, is titled "The Listening Project." Projected here are microscopic images of cells dancing to biological rhythms. A TV monitor in the wall shows torsos, flowers, the sky, endlessly morphing. If there's a story here, it's not a linear one. Hang out for a while, or step this way to the Misunderstanding Room. This is an environment where sound dominates, a small white space dominated by a carpet and hassock. Coming from speakers in the wall are recordings of people talking about episodes of miscommunication with spouses and partners. Synchronized video monitors play through openings in the walls. There's poetry, conversations, the theories of sociolinguistic experts Deborah Tannen and Gregory Bateson. A video projected onto the floor shows somebody signing in American sign language. Speranza had help with "Misunderstanding" from Pittsburgh poet Jason Cohen and several other artists. Her hope is that the two pieces will reach beyond the art community and speak to those interested in communication, healing and self-transformation. She's the first to say that neither room holds answers to any communications problem or philosophical dilemma. "I'm not trying to present answers," she says. "Just possibilities." Speranza is a research fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in community based public artworks and interactive, multi-media installations. She says that despite rapid cultural and technological change, she sees the artist's job as being the same as ever -- "It's to illuminate different aspects of being human." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA