What is Missing?
This free digital release of sounds from the wild that were used in the Earth Day 2012 celebration at Bloomberg Tower in New York City, features artist Maya Lin’s What is Missing? memorial to the planet. Ms. Lin, who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Civil Rights Memorial, launched What is Missing? as a different kind of memorial—one of mixed media (audio, video, photography) in multiple places (with physical exhibits around the world including China, San Francisco, and New York City, as well as a multimedia website). What is Missing? transports viewers into the heart of the ongoing sixth mass extinction in the planet’s history, paying homage to the living things we have lost—and calling attention to the species and places we can still save.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library provided hundreds of audio recordings to Ms. Lin for the What is Missing? project. This contains a sampler of those sounds—haunting songs of Common Loons and Humpback Whales, a symphony of nighttime in the Everglades and the echo of the call of the Golden Toad, a species now gone forever.