Dix in Sound in Situ: A Traveling Audio Installation

Listener warning: Please note that the piece includes some adult language, as well as mentions of mental illness, suicide, and the treatment of mentally ill patients that some listeners may find upsetting. Listener discretion is advised.

Incorporating original music, archival interview snippets, hotline recordings, primary documents, and found sounds, Dix in Sound in Situ is a new traveling audio installation by Felix Obelix. The piece will be premiered May 31–June 2, 2019 in Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, North Carolina at SEEK Raleigh. Visitors will listen to the installation on headphones as they walk through the park, experiencing the collapse of time and history, and connecting them to the artist, to the place, and to the sounds themselves. The audio piece focuses in particular on the history of the former mental hospital in Dix Park, as well as mental health issues in the past and present. 


Thank you to Raleigh Arts, who sponsored this project. 

I note that I am an artist, and this is an artistic piece. Though I used primary documents and extensively researched the topic prior to the piece’s creation, I am not a historian, documentarian, or journalist. As an artist, I strove for truth and the ethical use of materials, but did not hold myself to the particular standards and modes of practice of journalists, documentarians, and historians.

Credits
Conceived, researched, recorded, and produced by Felix Obelix.
All music composed, performed, and recorded by Felix Obelix.
All field recordings were made in Dorothea Dix Park by Felix Obelix.
Final audio mixed by Barnabas Poffley.
The readers were: Jane Allen Wilson, Hank Hardigan, Brian Risk, Tom Vanaman, Kate Lothman, Ian Ostrowski, Kathleen Block, Josh Starmer, Alexia Kelley, and Billy Sugarfix.

Thank You
Thank you to: Ernie Dollar of the City of Raleigh Museum; Alex Maiolo and Martin Hall of Lee-Moore Insurance; Tamara Kissane and her podcast, The Artist Soapbox; Sara Zaleta; Max Spitzer; Tift Merritt; Robert Cantrell; Genevieve Dawson; Erin Binkley; Adam Dodds; Ginger Wagg; the NC State Archives; Newspapers.com; and the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The studio equipment I used to make this project was made possible by an Ella Fountain Pratt Emerging Artists Grant from the Durham Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

My sincerest thanks go to the brave people who called the special mental health hotline I set up for this project. The prompt of the hotline was: “What about your experience with mental illness do you wish that other people knew?” Voicemails were left anonymously. If you are a hotline caller and are reading this, I thank you for your candor and willingness to share. Your voices really made this piece. I hope you like the final product.


Mental Health Resources
If you’re in the United States and have questions about mental health issues, you can contact the National Alliance on Mental Illness Helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI.

If you or a loved one is experiencing a mental health crisis, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK.

If you’re outside the US, many countries have similar hotlines and resources. You’re just one internet search away from help and you deserve it.

Dix in Sound in Situ

Felix Obelix is the moniker of interdisciplinary musician and artist Wendy Spitzer. Her diverse output spans music composition and performance, visual and community artmaking, writing, research, and modes of participatory inquiry. Her projects have been funded by Raleigh Arts; Downtown Durham, Inc.; the Durham Arts Council; the Orange County Arts Commission; the Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology; and the Strowd Roses Foundation. Under the moniker Felix Obelix, she has released two albums of original compositions: The Tick of the Clock, the Beat in the Chest on the Pox World Empire label (2010) and The Ringtone Album on the Potluck Foundation label (2013). Other experiences have included a time capsule project, the organization of a genre-bending music festival, original scores composed and performed live to silent films, studio session work, a choir commission, theatre and soundtrack scoring, as well as solo and group visual art shows. She has a Bachelor’s of Music in Performance from UNC-Chapel Hill and a Master of Music in Creative Practice from Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK), which culminated in a final thesis entitled, Trust Them With Your Weird and Strange Notes: An Arts-Based Research Perspective on Vulnerability and the Social Dynamic in Creative Collaboration.