Machine Project sounds out the boundaries of the museum experience at the Hammer with bells, guitars and houseplants

In the upstairs gallery of the Hammer Museum’s current “Outside the Box” exhibit, a line from composer and performer Meredith Monk’s lithograph collection reads, “I have always thought that sound and space were inseparable.” Yet despite this connection, museums have a long history of being stiflingly silent spaces.

On Saturday, for a change, there was more to be heard in the echoing halls of the Hammer Museum than simply the pattering of footsteps ““ in fact, there was music everywhere. “Everyone in a place,” composed by Machine Project sonic artist Chris Kallmyer and part of the “Soundings: Bells at the Hammer” event, gave each museum patron a bell to wear around their neck, along with free admission, in exchange for making beautiful sounds throughout the galleries.

“Usually high art is very ‘don’t touch,’ but this is a case where everyone can participate and the real job of the audience is to put their ears on and listen,” Kallmyer said.

Handed to visitors as they entered the museum and received their bell was a card that read, “Wear a bell and consider your surroundings.” In addition to the day’s goal of bringing music to the space, “Bells at the Hammer” was very much about creating a new dialogue between the museumgoer and the visual art.

One particular demographic of the bell-themed day is the under-12 crowd, the newest and most unlikely of museum patrons.

“I like anything that makes kids comfortable to make sound in spaces like museums and churches,” Kallmyer said. “Where kids can be themselves.”

And the presence of curious giggling children at the Hammer can certainly help to relax a museum’s stereotypical stuffy atmosphere.

“We all have this expectation that museums are these silent, hallowed halls, and I think it’s fun to play with that a bit,” said Allison Agsten, curator of public engagement at the Hammer.

The Hammer has long been a place that plays with the accepted rules about what museums are, and in recognition of these efforts, last year the Hammer was awarded the James Irvine Foundation’s Arts Innovation Fund. The funding is what enabled the creation of the Artist in Residence project that employs Machine Project, the Echo Park-based collective of which Kallmyer is a part.

“Our aim with Machine Project is to really explore the visitor experience and create new ways for our guests to interface with the museum,” Agsten said. “And hopefully, while we’re doing that, create a new model for those kinds of experiences.”

Other Machine Project projects to that end at the Hammer include a live guitar soundtrack, which allows patrons to be followed around the museum by an improvising guitarist.

“It lets people have a personal, unique experience in the art gallery space, its just one person playing music to another person, based on the art that they’re looking at,” Kallmyer said. “The way that sound can color the visual experience is really potent and powerful.”

This may be something one needs to experience firsthand to believe.

“It’s really interesting to take a trip through the galleries without the live personal soundtrack, and then to take a look with the music,” Agsten said. “I saw things I don’t think I would have ever seen otherwise.”

The same can be said for the bell day, which also featured bell-related pieces by an African bell quartet, Colin Woodford’s cymbal performance and Machine Project member Elisabeth McMullin’s Christmas-themed Santa bell music.

McMullin creates the music using an animatronic ornament she received as a Christmas gift.

“At the time I was really into circuit bending, so I was like, ‘Ooh, I could do something with this,’” McMullin said.

For bell day, the Santas are set up in the Hammer’s coatroom-turned-mini-theater, complete with Christmas lights and bean bag chairs, playing tunes a little more complex than the harmonious ringing of the visitors’ neck-worn bells.

“I think a lot of art is just getting people to look at everyday things in new ways,” McMullin said of her project. “Circuit bending in general is sort of about taking this kind of electronic culture that I grew up in and bringing it back in a different way.”

Up next for Machine Project at the Hammer is a vacation for patrons’ houseplants, complete with performances directed at the plants, and potentially performances by the plants.

“We could do an amplified cactus,” Kallmyer joked, or maybe he was serious.

When they’ve already turned museumgoers into musicians, a coatroom into a concert hall and brought a new vibrancy to the Hammer’s galleries, anything seems possible.