Dear Mirjam and List Fellows,
As I was reading your comments I could not help but think of a
interesting project being developed at L3D by Elisa Giaccardi. The
project, The Silence of the Lands, uses the notion of metadesign,
PDAs and sonic environment acquisition, mapping, etc. to create what
they are calling a pervasive museum that explores the conservation of
natural and urban sonic environments through the participant(s)
actions and dialog...
"Silence of the Lands enables participants to annotate and map the
soundscape of urban and natural environments. Participants can record
and collect ambient sounds, create and share individual and
collective cartographies, and use them as conversation pieces of a
social dialogue on natural quiet. The result is a pervasive museum in
which natural quiet is transformed into a living and affective
geography that changes over time according to participants'
perceptions and interpretations of their environmental setting. Our
sociotechnical architecture is purposely designed to create affective
geographies of place that encourage and support processes of social
dialogue and cultural negotiation. We look at digital cartography as
a form of storytelling capable of pervasively feeding back social
debate over long periods of time."
From- http://www.thesilence.org/
What I find interesting, and that you bring up as well, is that
public/urban/natural space is difficult to intervene with certain
kinds of new media work. I think projects like this are a good
example of the kind of consideration of these spaces it seems you are
calling for.
I also like this notion of the pervasive museum, which seems to move
beyond the boundaries of the institution in a much more complex
manner (similar to Janet Cardiff's work), while engaging it.
Ndrew
On Mar 27, 2006, at 2:30 PM, Interactionfield wrote:
> Hallo list,
>
> I would like to come back to Ginas project Spine, connecting
> visuals with
> sound which gave the images an additional depth. I wonder how loud
> the
> sound was and how difficult to negotiate with the permission of
> city. The
> issue of sound in public space connected to visuals I think is an
> interesting topic that deserves more attention and even can be used to
> trigger interaction with a visual artpiece. From my point of view of a
> trained urban planner this seems to be a topic that is relevant if
> new media
> art steps out into urban public space and is confronted with not
> only a new
> audience but a set of whole other rules and conventions different from
> gallery space. Let me be a bit provocative, I can definitely recommend
> artists and media art curators who curate in urban public space, which
> became quite popular recently to know a bit more about the concept and
> characteristics of public space and not only about the topic of
> surveillance
> and the fact that they face a wider audience, they dont have to
> know how to
> design a plaza, but..... hm, thats another discussion what would be
> necessary to know ...
>
> OK back to visuals and sound in urban space
>
> Sound is usually treated as noise in urban space, urban planners
> learn quite
> detailed various methods how to protect inhabitants from the sound
> of the
> city. Even though the attitude towards audio disturbance varies in
> different
> countries (the sensitivity in Germany seems to be extremely high.... )
> Concerning commercial screens in public spaces, the restriction to
> run them
> mute is considered as a huge disadvantage since there is no
> tradition of
> mute videos in the development of advertising. Sound is also an
> essential
> part of the movie culture which predeterms the viewer in public
> space. So
> there is a conflict between subconscious expectations and
> possibilities.
>
> Visuals in urban space is usually treated as information and also
> widely
> accepted as advertisement (see the coverage of whole buildings with
> advertisements) Only recently people start to talk more serious
> about visual
> and light pollution. On the other hand, traditional information
> transmission
> via sound has more and more vanished since the booming traffic noise
> problems in our cities.
>
> But sound is now recently discovered by media artists as element
> that can be
> integrated in an urban experience. The idea of Soundwalks, sound
> annotations
> or urban sonic cartography have increased. Of course it is an
> important
> question for curating these works: How much connected and dependent
> is the
> sound on being listened to at the specific outdoor location, how
> much is
> sound an image connected with each other, are there deeper
> interactions
> between sound and the surrounding ( I mean more than just that the
> sound is
> triggered via a GPS location code and is telling you something
> about the
> history of the place), does the sound help me to build a new
> relation to the
> space and maybe to its other inhabiting people.
>
> Another thing, often headphones are used or the individual mobile
> phone to
> again protect the urban space from "the art noise". In a sense they
> play
> with an immersion of the individual user into the surrounding urban
> space
> while the user from the outside is more perceived as an alien. Not
> to say
> that this can be also used specificly as interesting effect, acting
> as a
> stranger since the encounter with strangers is another underlying
> concept of
> urban public space....
>
> It would be interesting to see more artworks that play on a deeper
> level
> with the connectedness of the urban visual and the urban
> soundscape. For
> example with the discrepancy that visuals are accepted to have a
> wide range
> of visibility while sound usually is accepted either to be received
> individually via headphones or only in a very short range for a
> small public
> or in in a very short time in form of interventions.
>
> What other interesting effects can be created, than that the sound is
> already audible while the visuals are still not visible. It seems
> it is a
> challenge to find ideas that play with this restrictions that occur
> if you
> go with media art into public space. Especially what more is
> possible than
> showing mute video art in public space and how can it be connected
> with
> sound or even with smell? Spine seems to have shown that use of
> sound can be
> a tool to help visual art to compete with the visual overload of urban
> spaces.
>
> Does anyone have more experience with curating artpieces that play
> with this
> difficult connection of sound and visual screenings in the outdoor
> public
> space without the necessity to use special equipment like headphones?
>
> Best,
> Mirjam
>
>
> ___________________________
> Mirjam Struppek
> Interactionfield
> Urban Media Research, Berlin
> http://www.interactionfield.de
> http://www.urbanscreens.org
>
> Urban Space, Public Sphere and the New Media
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