#audio walk

📸 photographer Jakob Carlsen, edits and collage by Nelya - Tumblr nelyft 🌷

Lars Mikkelsen and Tom Wlaschiha working at the project SUNDETS STILHED/ The Silence of the Sounds - an audio walk with Bertolt Brecht.

Hamburg: Selbstgeführte Schnitzeljagd durch das berüchtigte Rotlichtviertel St. Pauli Entdecke Hamburg St. Pauli auf eigene Faust! Selbsterkundungstour (ca. 1,5 Stunden) €5,99 pro Person. Mit Reeperbahn und dem Rotlichtviertel, der Partymeile Große Freiheit, der Geschichte der Beatles, Herbertstraße, Alter Elbtunnel und vielem mehr. Für Android/iOS, Kopfhörer empfohlen, Sprache: Deutsch. St.…

Check Point 2030 is a project which explores playful urban listening and future thinking.

Combining interviews with key interviewees, performative interventions and audio collected at playful workshops into an engaging site specific audio installation.

The installation for self-directed exploration will be available through out summer 2019 and invites the listener to listen to, engage with, and question the future of the immediate surroundings around Check Point Invaliden strasse.

Exhibition: Place listening at Gallery ROM. Part of the core program “the Playground” at Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019 read more here.

What if the focus of urban living was not productivity but play?

Place Listening explores how playful urban listening can expand the relationships between people and the places they inhabit. We live in a time where efficiency is favoured over play: roads are for circulation not interaction; places are designed around consumption not co-existence; we sleep not to dream but to be productive the next day. Listening and play can enable forms of awareness that challenge these ingrained norms and allow for different ways of being in the city.

Place Listening is developed with citizens and visitors of Oslo through a series of listening, playing, and walking workshops in May 2019. Recordings of the workshops have been edited into a site-specific audio walk around the area of ROM. Inside the gallery, you can experience a sound-based documentation of this audio walk and the process behind its making. Grab some headphones and let the Future guide you through a playful exploration of the stories, opinions and places of the present.

The artist duo Sachs/Westerdahl introduce the idea of place listening as an immersive, embodied and multidirectional engagement with urban space. Place Listening explores playful urban listening across different settings and media, combining site-specific audio walks based on a series of public workshops with a sound-based exhibition and a game-manual for self-directed play at ROM for Art and Architecture.

The Playground initiates a game of exploring and listening to the city reclaiming the streets as a site of joyful and thoughtful experimentation.

As children, we recognise the role of play as a critical element of human development. But as we age, play as an act of unbounded experimentation and learning is reframed as something silly and extraneous to personal development and life fulfilment. Work instead becomes the thing that we define ourselves around. However, through rituals of collective play, human societies make sense of the places we inhabit and emancipate ourselves from industrialist motives.

The Playground explores how play can challenge the utilitarian nature of public spaces driven by efficiency imperatives, and instead engender collective acts of social existence. The Playground revels in the ways in which play can free us from the confines of the growth paradigm and expand our understanding of how urban space is imagined, perceived, used, discussed, controlled and planned.

A walk in your words - Listening to year 2052. audio walk 

At the conference "Planning 2052" zURBS invited architects, planners, artists and citizens to go on a performative audio walk through East London. Here they listed to the future, who guided them through its current beginnings, as well as the hopes, fears and visions that people have for what is to come.

The tour was based on a series of open and invited workshops and interviews held on site and carried out by Nina Lund Westerdahl and Cecilie Sachs Olsen.

“What will urban planning be like in 2052? This one-day conference [brought ] together policy makers, researchers and practitioners to envisage the role of urban planning in the future.

Planning for the profound political and social shifts that the future requires can feel intractable and overwhelming. Everyday realities makes it difficult to look beyond the rhythm of political cycles and yet it is critical that we do.

By taking a step away from our immediate constraints, this conference envisages government’s role in city design in 2052. What will a culture, in which regenerative ecosystems, circular economies, and human flourishing are core pillars of a new economy, mean for policy making and urbanism?

By brokering relationships between artists, creative practitioners and policy makers and extrapolating from bold urban planning initiatives, we will collectively engender a hopeful and practical conversation about the future role of policy in tomorrow’s economy.

Planning 2052 is part of the Oslo Architecture Triennale and programmed in partnership with the Architecture Foundation, Royal Holloway University, The British Academy and Rich Mix.” https://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/events/planning-2052

Concept, sound edit and workshops made by Nina Lund Westerdahl and Cecilie Sachs Olsen.

A group of city researchers from the future travel back in time to see how it really was in Arendal in the year 2018.

Participants was invited to join the future city researchers on a playful and poetic exploration through Arendal's streets. With headphones on, the city's present times are explored through retrospects from the future. The walk in the city streets took you to various parts of the city, to shopping centers and parking garages, and to old and new harbor areas. Along the way, the tour offered meetings with the city's population, and with politicians, town planners and property developers. How do future city researchers experience a Norwegian small town in 2018? And how do we experience the future of the city in our time?

zURBS (NLW and Ceciie Sachs Olsen)in collaboration with Oslo Architecture Trienale

Here’s some funny impressions from participants (in Norwegian):

https://www.facebook.com/Oslotriennale/videos/1728632987247978/

https://www.facebook.com/Oslotriennale/videos/1728633380581272/

Script for Soundcloud file. [Quiet room]

 For an instance, consider two realities.

 [beeping sound that intensifies]

 Two realities just as likely as the other.

 [Bird sanctuary; birds noises]

 There’s a bench at Waterfront Park, in memory of Dr. Ronald J. Silvers. You can’t miss this one. It faces the beach of Okanagan Lake with signed graffiti tagged I Luv Destiny. We’ll start here. Sit down. Admire the view.

 In the summer, the pathway is busy and the beachfront littered with families and joggers and people out walking their dog. The water is a tad chilly, but the sand is warm —dig your toes into— warm and if you can avoid the crowds and the odour that tends to accompany every music festival, then bring a book.

 But in the winter, the spray off the water leaves the air chilled —walkers huddled together under dark coats with hats that hide the exposed skin of their necks. On this particular day, a balmy February 17th, the sky is a miserable shade of gray. Only cracks in the lining let in any warmth, most of it stolen by the wind. Ducks descend upon the water, dipping their heads below the surface for food while a lone seagulls scavenges the sand, freshly exposed from melted snow.

 I detest the winter months in Kelowna. I hop from one heated space to another, hurrying myself along, boots dragging along the sandy pavement. John on the other hand… he loves it. Likes the quiet. Always says it keeps the wusses away —the fair-weather fans of a city absent during the tougher months.

 [ambulance sounds]

 [bird sanctuary]

 Our house is not far from this park. When we were younger, we’d head out on clear mornings, breakfast rolls packed in a paper bag with a shared thermos of coffee between us, and do a loop of the trail before work. If the path was deserted, usually in the colder months, he’d step over the low-lying gates, past the ‘No Trespassing’ signs, and down to the water. Crouched with his corduroys just scraping over the dirt, he’d stack up rocks by the shore into little inuksuks.

 [hospital sounds]

 “We have a twenty five year old male who was found in Okanagan lake. He was walking across the rocks near the shore and fell into the water, hitting his head on the way down. He was found early morning by his girlfriend. He is extremely cold to all extremities. His temperature is 34.5 and blood pressure is 90 over 50. Heart rate is 45, respirate is at eleven, and oxygen is 96%. He is unresponsive with a sluggish pupil response and going into hypovolemic shock. We started a peripheral IV to his right arm. A number twenty gauge with normal saline running. He is covered in several warm blankets and he has a history of asthma.”

 [bird sanctuary]

 Stand up and turn to the left. We’re going to walk back in the direction of my house-

 [kitchen sounds… clock sounds…paper turning]

  -Follow the sound of my footsteps as they pick up, almost to a jog.

 [hospital footsteps ( 3:50 to ding at 3:28]

 We’re going to take the first left here down the gravel path. There’s a pair of benches at the very end —we’ll head there. Notice the gr owing sound of bird songs.

 [wedding sounds]

 And the ducks wading through the small inlet to the right.

 You can see the banks of West Kelowna just across the lake from here. When John and I first moved here, he worked on the West side for a logging company while I taught in town. I’d come home on weekdays and watch the bridge’s lift span rise for boats from the kitchen window.

 “Keep your eyes peeled for me,” he’d tell me during our mornings walks. He’d point across the water, his finger following the flow of commuters, and focus real hard like he could see every individual in the distance.  “Always keep me in your sights,” he would whisper.

 Now, sit down on Bob’s bench, facing the water.

 Spot the cars travelling down towards the new bridge. Can you see the people inside? The family of five traveling through on vacation. The dad with his three kids in the back of his grey crossover, going to swim practice. Two teenage girls with their N, making use of endless free-time, and the nursing student heading back to the hospital for another shift.

 [hospital recording: 21:36-21:20]

 What about the ambulance streaming past them?

 [beeping  sounds]

 [hospital sounds]

 [bird sounds]

 He’s stable right now

 [bird sounds]

 [hospital]

 Maybe you should head home or get something to eat.

 [clock ticking]

 [kart wheeling]

 Does he have any family we can contact?

 [bird sanctuary]

 John and I met in high school. We lived in Grand Cache, a small town in northern Alberta near the border of BC. Our mothers were close, working together at the same ad agency in town since before we were born.

 There wasn’t a whole lot of work up there besides oil. John’s dad would leave for weeks at a time with the others, heading east for work. Our families got to know the foreman of the site real well. He’d bring back some of the crew in the truck at the end of the month, with John’s dad usually passed out drunk in the cab. Eventually the work was too much for him and he moved south. John’s mother told him it was the weather, said his dad couldn’t handle the cold like they could. She found it ironic, considering how thick he could be.

 [other hospital sounds]

 What reality do we exist in?

 Turn around in your seat and spot the greying wooden boards of the zig zag bridge over that inlet. Do you see John standing against the rail? Is he there?

 As people, we only exist in one. We only experience the consequences of events once. We make choices and see how those around us decide to react. At this moment in time, there is only one stream of events that will ever take place, one timeline that will diverge and converge in on itself, a mingling of lives.