Installation artist and musician Andrea Brook has never been to Iowa before. But as she stands on top of the Civic Center with a 360-view of night-time Des Moines to install her traveling show, Sonic Butterfly, she says that she likes it a lot.
Sonic Butterfly is a 200-foot long harp made up of brass strings, resonance chambers and whatever buildings happen to be around. For her Des Moines shows this weekend, the lucky building is the Civic Center.
The installation of such a colossal instrument is an art in itself. Brook’s crew began setup around 7:20 p.m. on Wednesday night, starting with arranging the platform Brook will perform on, which sits in Cowles Commons. Next, they set up the strings.
Brook uses spools of brass wire for her strings. From the roof of the Civic Center, her team secures the wire into wooden blocks, which they then drop down the side of the building to Brook who is waiting at the bottom. With the wooden block in hand, Brook makes her way carefully across 3rd Street toward the platform on Cowles Commons where she connects that string to the body of her harp. And so the process goes until all 26 strings are in place. Brook estimates that this process usually takes around four hours.