THE ANCHORAGE

PLACEText: Rei Inamoto

Many of the venues in New York City have started to move away from the centers of Manhattan in recent years. Places like Chelea galleries and Queens P.S.1 are a great escape not only from the daily dose of people and traffic of New York City but into an unexpectedly peaceful and pleasurable state of culture. The Anchorage at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge is another one of the few venues around New York City where you can experience various types of events.

Strangely located inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Anchorage is a beautiful and massive space that is Gothic-like in quality and industrial in appearance. More than a century old, the space is encapsulated in brick walls, creating a raw spatial experience for its visitors. Yet, because of the grandness of the structure, the Anchorage feels almost like a church, only that it feels more like an industrial kind of church.

Creative Time, an organization that organizes events periodically at the Anchorage, is currently hosting an installation exhibition called “NoiseGate” by an Austrian art duo Kurt Hentschlager and Ulf Langheinrich, also known as Granular-Synthesis.

On all the walls of a pitch-dark space, the duo has installed huge, juxtaposed screens, onto which a human head is projected. With a repeating mechanical noise echoing in the space, the heads are moving rapidly, sometimes roughly coming to a halt. The term Granular Synthesis is derived from granulated sound synthesis, which is a technique for synthesizing digital audio. In this installation, the artists “transform people into machines.”

Regardless of what’s happening at the Anchorage, you should definitely go there to escape from usual New York scenes. It is one of the few sanctuaries that we can expect to enjoy. I desperately hope that it will not be invaded by commercialism like most of New York City has been.

The Anchorage
Address: Inside the base of the Brooklyn Bridge at Cadman Plaza West
https://creativetime.org

Text: Rei Inamoto
Photos: Rei Inamoto

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