Khris Soden's project, "You Were Here", set out to inform members of specific Portland area communities about their history by putting up posters and signage relating to past events in the neighborhoods. These works were install all over Portland, on telephone posts, and newspaper boxes, among other locations, during the run of Core Sample.

Sam Gould's project "From the Left of the Dial" brought a number of Portland artists, from a variety of different media, together for a party. Gould spoke with each artist individually via telephone, created a 60 minute long radio program from the talks, and broadcast the audio on Pirate radio in Chicago, IL. at the Stockyard Institute's Urbs in Horto project, as well as on a walk around town during a stop on the band Pointlineplane's US tour. The goal of the project being to disseminate the thoughts, interests, and process behind Portland community working practices further afield, hoping that the talks might interest, and possibly influence, artists/cultural workers in communities outside the Portland area.

At the Red76 Core Sample installation a book of photos of Sam's party, and interview transcriptions were on hand. Viewers could bring along their own radio and tune in to radio program.

Community Jukebox @ Core Sample project descriptions :
Khris Soden -
"You Were Here"

Communities and neighborhoods are formed and defined not only by the people that live there, but also by the people that lived there in years past. For example, Manhattan's Little Italy and San Francisco's Chinatown show how the history and events of a certain place can flavor the attitudes and interactions of it's present inhabitants. Communities that understand their connections to the past are stronger communities.

Hoping to draw people closer together by fostering an interest in the history and background of their neighborhoods is the goal of artist and amateur historian Khris Soden's Community Jukebox project, "You Were Here."

Based on the idea that information is more likely to be communicated between people if it is presented in a unique or unusual format, "You Were Here" subverts the media that people see every day - street signs, band fliers, newspaper box advertisements - by replacing the expected information with historical facts and trivia.

- Street signs will describe the original land owner of a certain neighborhood.
- Posters for concerts that occurred decades ago will be found stapled to telephone poles.
- Newspaper boxes will advertise events for the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition.
- Lost and found posters will query about the location of historic, but long-gone, buildings
Over 20 separate items, each dealing with a different subject, have been prepared - usually in multiple quantities - and will be placed in site-specific parts of Portland during the month of October.

Through the dissemination of these pieces of historical information in ephemeral, common urban formats, Soden hopes they will take on a relevance and a sense of immediacy amongst the people of each neighborhood, fostering dialogue within the immediate community, along with the added benefit of learning a little about their neighborhood's past.

Sam Gould -
"From the Left of the Dial"

When Randy Gragg, the curator of Core Sample, first came to me to discuss his plans for the exhibit he asked me who else I thought would be good to have join in. I had a lot of people in mind. There were so many people whose work/life I admired.The last five years or so in Portland have seen the start of a new way of doing things - I hope. Of not sniping too much about the guy next to you, and helping one another out, finding new ways to get by in the world, not just the art world. I feel like I came to Portland like a blank slate, looking for a new way to live my life. Portland, and the people in it, showed me how I wanted to live my life and do my work.

In the time that the initial idea for this exhibit came about my wife and I have moved away to Chicago so she may attend law school. We’d been planning this for a while, but it didn’t make our leaving any easier. Once out of town I started to realize something that I hadn’t before - the rest of the art world, the rest of the world actually, is not like Portland.

I don’t want to idealize the town. It’s got some really bad aspects to it. To name a few; no one has a job for the most part, it’s the drunkest town I’ve ever lived in, and, considering your out late most of the nights drinking, the buses stop too early in the evening. These aspects also make Portland one of the most incredible places to live and work though; giving people time to do their work, as well as giving everyone a sense of spontaneity and improvisation. Lots of things can happen when you stay over night at your friends place because you missed the bus and don’t want to walk all the way to North Portland in the rain. You certainly couldn’t afford to call a cab.

With this in mind I decided to ask a number of friends to meet at Red76 co-curator Matthew Yake’s apartment for a party on Wednesday, October 1st. 2003.

Each person at the party had, in one way or another, meant a great deal to me concerning the work they do, the way they choose to live their life, their choices of process and production. As a whole I wanted to set up a party that would be a litmus test of what has been so energizing about the Portland art community of the past five years or so.

I spoke on the phone with each person there concerning their thoughts on Portland, the local arts scene, the community in general, and the pro’s and con’s of it all. Afterward I edited these talks into a radio program and broadcast the material on a pirate radio station in my new hometown. The goal being to disseminate the thoughts, interests, and process behind Portland community working practices further afield, hoping that the talks might interest, and possibly influence, artists/cultural workers in communities outside the Portland area, specifically Chicago with this first broadcast.

And, as well, it’s another excuse to show my friends a good time and have Matthew spin some of that Deep Reggae (!). What more could I ask for?

Katy Asher -
As my contribution to Community Jukebox, I will encourage participants to plot the connections that they have throughout the city via a transient kiosk containing a map and mapping kit. I will serve as the starting point and starting person for plotting these relationships by pinning my name and address to the point on a map of the Metro Area that corresponds to my current residence. I will invite as many people as I feel connected to in the city to attend a party at my house and bring along with them a picture of their house. I will ask guests at the party to add their names and addresses to the map. As each new name is added, it will be connected to my name with a line. In addition to this, the participants will fill out a small calling card listing his or her name, what he or she sees as their connection to me and something that he or she knows about me.

These cards will be collected, sorted and bound to create a book that corresponds to the map. Participants will also be invited to connect to one another following the same procedure of drawing a line and filling out the card. Each participant at the initial party will be encouraged to host a mapping party at their own residence, inviting as many people as they feel connected to to join in the process. Overall, I hope for the map to serve as a tactile and tangible depiction of people’s connections within the city of Portland, emphasizing that we are more connected to one another than we might initially be aware.

Tim DuRoche and Lisa Radon -
Tim DuRoche and Lisa Radon have created a discrete site-specific sound installation intertwining wordsound-poetry-music and available technology: motion sensors and tape players. Countering the daily schizophonia brought about by the noise of time, the clatter of traffic, the artists focus on endangered sounds (water, breath, words, the peal of bell, whispered notions) to create something that is both acoustically transparent and hyperreal.

DuRoche and Radon take their initial inspiration from ethnomusicologist Steven Feld's work on the Kaluli people of Papau New Guinea and the acoustemological notion of Liftupoversounding: a wonderful grand metaphor for natural sonic relations, the ways "tones combine together in time, as well as for social relations, for people doing things together in concert. . .Sounds are dense and layered, blended, and forever thinning and thickening- a constant figure to ground motion of densities, decays, and fades, of overlapping alternating, and interlocking sounds."

Voices and sounds approximating music, the immediacy of melody, the intimacy of overheard conversation. Woven foreground to back-, in synchrony and out of phase-in the fracture and seams of these strata are palpable kernels of what can only be felt/heard in close proximity.