Eclipsing
Eclipsing was a site-specific, two-mile-long soundwalk created for the 2024 total eclipse of the sun, which happened to coincide with the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas. The audio, accessed in public space through headphones, would begin spontaneously. The walk was full of “was-that-part-of-it?” moments—sound activated by location and time of day, narration researched and recorded in Austin, and live interactions hidden in plain sight. Just another day, regular people doing regular things, and then suddenly, magically synchronous. Like an eclipse.
The work was created by Andrew Schneider and Annie Saunders, who collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University astrophysicist Katie Brevik to explore the concepts of the relativity of simultaneity, deep time, eclipse cycles, and star formation. It was developed with input from the local community and in partnership with the Long Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Austin. The project was made possible by the Simons Foundation, established by the late hedge fund manager Jim Simons and his wife Marilyn Simons to support research in mathematics and basic science, as part of the foundation’s 2024 “In the Path of Totality” initiative.
Point A is a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Andrew Schneider and Annie Saunders. They create site-responsive artworks that combine performance, installation, interactivity, sound art and new technologies and take place in public spaces.
Schneider is an OBIE award-winning performer, writer and artist who has created original works for theater, dance, sound, video, and installation since 2003. A member of the New York arts incubator Onassis ONX, he has conducted master classes on technology and performance at Bowdoin, Carleton and Connecticut College and teaches a recurring class on original-flavor reality at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He holds a BFA in Theater Arts from Illinois Wesleyan University and a masters degree in interactive telecommunications from NYU.
Saunders is a multidisciplinary creator and director of site-specific experiences. She has created award-winning multi-platform projects for major arts institutions, including the Public Theater in New York and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as site-specific projects in disused spaces set for demolition and experiential campaigns for such multinational brands as HP, MasterCard, Dos Equis, Bulleit and ASICS Worldwide.
Working together as Point A, Schneider and Saunders have created two earlier location-and-time-based soundwalks. Current, commissioned by Arts Brookfield and winner of the Tribeca Festival’s 2021 Immersive Award for Creative Nonfiction, was described in The New York Times as “casual, edifying and candid, asking us to consider the overlapping landscapes of the cemented-over wetlands, the skyscraper canyons, the storm surges — linking the city’s beating heart with the organs of our own bodies and questioning how, after so much distress, we might rebuild.” Kormós, a series of walks in Athens, was created for the Onassis Foundation’s 2022 exhibition Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data in Pedion tou Areos, the largest public park in Athens. Prodromos Tsiavos, Head of Digital & Innovation at the foundation’s Onassis Stegi cultural center, called it “a narrative that triggered emotions, challenged preconceptions, and revealed hidden stories.”
