Most artists use paintbrushes, clay, or pencils to create their work. Teri Rueb, a UB Media Study professor, uses sound.
Since 1996, Rueb has been creating innovative works of art called sound walks, pieces that use GPS and mobile phone devices to create an audio experience for those who pass by a designated site.
Currently on a teaching sabbatical to work on her latest project, No Place with Names, Rueb is residing at the Santa Fe Art Institute to work with local residents within the area where she aims to examine the concept of wilderness through a cross-cultural narrative.
The project features a shift in focus from her recent work.
"No Places with Names marks a new turn in my work in which I have become specifically focused on non-Western, non-Euro-centric perceptions of landscape and landscape experience," Rueb said.
This isn't the first time Rueb has embarked on such a project. Berlin, Boston, British Columbia, and trails near the Wadden Sea are all sites that can claim her signature work.
Traveling the globe for her work has inspired Rueb.
"I wanted to bring audiences back into dialogue with the everyday built and natural environment, to draw the eye away from the screen and direct it toward one's immediate surroundings, and to engage a kinesthetic awareness of the body in space, moving," Rueb said.
The Elsewhere: Anderswo Project, created in 2009, is her most well known piece. It is centered in the Oldenburg Botanical Garden and by a bike path around Neuenkirchen. Rueb said these interactive sound installations play samples from songs, TV shows, radio, and films and combine the sound with specific locations to create an experience connecting place with time.
"In the botanical garden...a visitor would wander through the gardens and in each different micro-climate they would encounter this patchwork of sounds that, like the gardens themselves, functions like a pastiche of place and time," Rueb said. "In Neuenkirchen visitors would ride bicycles through the countryside, encountering similar sounds, but in this case they are placed throughout the entire landscape of the village, such that its contemporary built structures...become almost like a stage set to the sound, blurring the mundane and the fantastic."
Rueb has remained committed to UB despite her artistic endeavor. She plans to continue educating her students about media art forms through her recently founded research center named Open Air Institute. With this institute, learning is based off of in-the-field experiences mixing media and technology with the environment.
The UB professor is planning to lead a summer course entitled On the Road: Media Geographies (DMS 418/518) when she returns from her sabbatical. The course focuses on the author Henry David Thoreau and locations found in his writing. Students will use mobile phones as well as the Internet, sound, and video technologies to create movies as they travel to locations which include Montreal, Cape Cod, and Quebec.
Rueb's students have been supportive of her artistic endeavors and lauded her commitment to education.
"Teri (Rueb) is a fantastic artist and an extremely generous instructor...Teri helps students navigate the process of research, writing, and creating so that one mode of thinking informs the other - your research becomes lead by your artistic practice, and you make better work," said Jessica Thompson, a former student of Rueb's and MFA in Media Study.
Rueb will return as a full-time professor in the fall semester.
Email: arts@ubspectrum.com
