The most striking aspect of Stephen Vitiello’s The Light of Falling Cars installation is the direct access that sound provides to the exhibition space itself. Perhaps more than any other piece in the exhibition, The Light of Falling Cars presents the "site" as the body of the work, adorned only by the transformations wrought upon it by sound. While the concept of site-specific work is hardly new, art institutions have been more hesitant to accept sound works as free-standing entities. Sound pieces demand a mode of listening/experiencing utterly different from visual work. Unfolding through loops and variations in time, the listener must pause, entering the space of the sound in order to trace those shifting paths. The mutually transfiguring relationship between sound and space, as such, remains a rich field for exploration. Stephen Vitiello’s work suggests how provocative such questioning can be.

Upon entering the room, there is a breathtaking stillness supporting the layers of sound, a calm that markedly separates it from the rest of the exhibition. A number of works in Greater New York make innovative and important use of P.S.1’s unique architecture. In gazing about this room, however, one suddenly becomes aware of its more subtle, banal qualities, and of the larger movements of Long Island City outside the windows. The sound reverberating on white walls, the light reflecting on the glossy, uneven floorboards, the chipped paint over brick in a corner: in the space Vitiello carves out, we can suddenly see the room as a room in itself. Visually, the three large windows are the most immediately impressive element. Seemingly out of place in a museum-space, they allow a flood of light to enter, and the stirrings of a breeze when one is left open a crack. From the center of the room, one sees a triptych vista of traffic and sky, the clustering of rushing cars on the overpass, and the occasional passing of the subway on angled, elevated tracks.

These elements would prove distracting in spaces with visual or audio-visual works, introducing elements beyond the control of the artist, the intrusion of the outside. Rather than creating a hermetic environment of controlled sensations, the external space around P.S.1 participates in the piece’s unfolding. Vitiello’s composition does not merely incorporate or articulate this space, however. Instead, the movements of each strain enter into an active engagement with it, pushing it open, emptying it out, or pulling back to provide a foundation for the space’s own movements. Beyond the window, breaks in the traffic create a stuttering flow on the overpass. Flocks of birds swirl lazily upward, breaking the line of the landscape, while a single bird, moving at a half-time rhythm, pushes steadily across the frame of view. The swells of lightly interwoven sound take up this play of chance, echoing it at certain points of synchronicity, and leaping forward at moments of counter-balance. The heavier drones beneath act as a vibrating base, while the lighter strains of string and accordion take flight or tumble back from those tones.