Workshop ›Listening to the Environment‹ with Peter Cusack

Photo by Laura Caroline Ranglack (Galaxaura)

Workshop ›Listening to the Environment‹
Peter Cusack, University of the Arts, London

Wednesday, Nov 9, 3:00-7:00 pm, ZeM – Brandenburgisches Zentrum für Medienwissenschaften, Potsdam

As an introduction Peter Cusack gave an overview of his work in field recording and environmental sound, in particular the project Sounds from Dangerous Places that asks the question, ›What can we learn of damaged places, like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, by listening to their sounds?‹

›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).

Drawing the soundscape

Experimental sketch on the socio-cultural aspects of the soundscape (detail; comprised in my master thesis on the soundscape as a field for cultural-anthropological research, p. 102)

 

›Close observation of a single subject, whether it is as tiny as Pasteur’s microbes or as great as Einstein’s universe, is the kind of work that happens less and less these days. Glued to computer and TV screens, we have forgotten how to look at the natural world, the original instructor on how to be curious about detail.‹ (Jennifer New)

Or, in other words: ›… reality is often stranger and more fascinating than anything we can make up.‹ (Jonathan Sterne)

I presented my master thesis at The Global Composition conference. An abstract is available here.

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Jennifer New (2005): Drawing from life, Princeton architectural press, p. 20.

Sterne, Jonathan (2005): The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, p. 338.