›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹

A miniature for mobiles inspired by Michel de Certeau’s seminal text ›Walking in the City‹, based on the radio aporee app

John Cleese, The Ministry of Silly Walks

›The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. It is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian (just as the speaker appropriates and takes on the language); it is a spatial acting-out of the place (just as the speech act is an acoustic acting-out of language).‹ (Michel de Certeau)

Photo by Judith Willkomm

›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹ is a sound art installation in public space, accessible via a customised smartphone app. Listeners are invited to explore and appropriate an area of hidden sounds–and to compose their own radio play by walking.

›Footsteps weave places together.‹ (Michel de Certeau)

©: Kerstin Kühl, 2013

›Walking in the City. Hidden Sounds and Mobile Places‹ was created and presented in September 2013 as an exceptional soundwalk for the KOSMOS Summer University 2013 ›Modern Walking. Innovative Urban Mobility‹ (here’s a video clip on KOSMOS Summer University).

Compose by walking! A miniature for mobiles

›Inside every room of every house of a street, each of them full of audible details, usually concealed behind closed doors: if it would be possible to listen to these everyday choreographies, what could you hear?‹

Buddhist temple at Berlin Ackerstraße (Photo: Andreas Praefcke)

This experimental project called Berlin Ackerstraße (2006-2007) takes you on a participant observation or rather, a participatory sound expedition in Berlin, Ackerstraße. It enables you to listen to the sounds of everyday life in Ackerstraße five years ago – while walking down the street today.

Miniatures for mobiles is an app which responds to your movements: you are literally composing by walking. You are wandering around in a radio play.

›In the Field‹. Symposium at the British Library

From 15th to 16th February, I attended In the Field, a symposium hosted by the British Library in collaboration with CRiSAP (Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice). Given the library’s own extensive collections of field recordings — ranging from oral history to ethnomusicological documents, from historical wildlife recordings to industrial sounds — it may just seem consequential for the British Library to adress contemporary practitioners of documentary recording. In fact, with its considerable line-up, In the Field truly aimed to further ›explore the art and craft of field recording‹: among others, speakers included Ximena Alarcón, Peter Cusack, Zoe Irvine, Christina Kubisch, Udo Noll, Salomé Voegelin, and Chris Watson.

As a point of departure, it was Joeri Bruyninckx’ task to relate contemporary field recording practices to its historical origins: back to the days of wildlife recordists Ludwig Koch (UK) or Albert Brand (US), when field recording meant to bring a mobile studio into ›the relative wilderness of the field‹ (Bruyninckx) — occasionally even mounted on a horse carriage.

Peter Kellogg from Albert Brand’s team recording in the swamps of Florida, 1936.