The 6.5-Meter Sculpture You Play by Hopping on a See-Saw

At Sydney's Circular Quay, a 6.5-meter sculpture spins, twirls, and totters in the middle of a public walkway. “There, Now, Here” is the work of Brooklyn duo Wade and Leta, their first public commission in Australia, built for the Vivid Sydney festival. Colossal covered it earlier this month.

The structure runs on wind, motors, and passersby. Horns, striped mobiles, and assorted curiosities stay in near-constant motion, and a soundscape by Josh Burgess moves with them. Every control is physical and open to anyone on the street. Hop onto one of two see-saws and your motion feeds the audio. Slide a row of faders and you bend its tempo, tone, and distortion. The sound is assembled from the city itself: water breaking on the rocks, the ding of the light rail, a crosswalk signal, and a lyrebird standing in for the bass at a bush doof, Australia's version of an open-air rave. Even the palette is sourced from place, a washed-out black, white, and sun-bleached pastel borrowed from Dorothea Mackellar's poem about Australia's “sunburnt country,” as if the whole rig had been left in the sun for a decade.

This is the shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being, staged in a public square. The whole point of the object is that you have to use your body, and share it with strangers, to make anything happen. Think fairground calliope, scaled up to a building and wired into a city's own noise. It hands back something a screen quietly took: a reason to move, outdoors, alongside other people. What if more of our machines asked for a push on a see-saw instead of a tap on glass? And once a city can play itself back, who gets to decide how it sounds?