French musician, composer and artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot is known for generating sounds by unconventional means, using ‘instruments’ ranging from vacuum cleaners to birds. Now at the Park Avenue Armory, his installation ‘Clinamen’ employs ceramic bowls, slowly propelled by currents around large circular basins of water, to create a hypnotically relaxing soundtrack as they gently collide. Positioned at the center of the Armory’s massive drill hall on a raised wooden platform, the piece invites visitors to site poolside looking for patterns in the bowls’ movement and listening to the sound of their chimes as they make contact. Titled after the unpredictable swerving of atoms, Clinamen celebrates the possibilities of setting up a situation and seeing what happens. (On view at the Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side through Aug 9th.)
