Dawn Chorus and Speculations at Rockefeller Center’s Top of The Rock

Rockefeller Center is proud to present the pioneering work of artist Sarah Mehoyas in combining captivating art and innovative technology, with Dawn Chorus and Speculations, at Top of The Rock, from July 15th through September 12th.

Dawn Chorus, an immersive and interactive, multi-sensory, augmented-reality experience, delights viewers with holographic birds fluttering around a physical Yamaha Disklavier player piano. These birds land on the piano initiating a chain reaction of audible phenomena. Birds are intrinsically related to music, so much so that we have come to call their communication “bird song,” and their seemingly choral singing at dawn the “dawn chorus.”

In Dawn Chorus, the piano is the stand-in for the fountain, a mythological trope (e.g., the fountain of youth, the fountain of life, etc.). The composition of the soundtrack that emanates from the speakers is itself a composite made up of several elements including recordings of “electromagnetic dawn chorus,” a phenomenon that refers to radio waves being converted at dawn with the use of proper radio equipment to sounds that resemble birds’ dawn chorus.
The space invites visitors to experience the superimposition of not only different kinds of human and artificial intelligence, but also the innate intelligence of the natural world, through a cyborgesque constellation of hardware and software. To learn more about the work, please click here.

Also on view at Top of the Rock, Meyohas will display eight large-scale photographs titled Speculations as vinyl installations on the glass panels overlooking the New York City skyline. These works, created through the manipulation of physical reflective surfaces and water, portray perspectival tunnels extending into infinity.