Fall Soundwalks – Sept. 1, 27 + Oct. 4, 2020
False; Flat; Fake – a soundwalk
A self-guided soundwalk for Soundwalk September.
Created by Jorma Kujala
Launch date: September 1, 2020
This walk was created with Echoes. To get the full experience follow these steps:
- Download the app to your smart phone or mobile device from Google Play or the Apple App Store.
- Access the walk on Echoes.
If you’d prefer to follow the soundwalk ‘offline’, without following the geo-located recordings on Echoes you can download a copy of the route map here.
DOWNLOAD ON ECHOES VIEW MAP MORE INFO
By focusing on the study of humans in society, A.S. Turberville reminds that historical research brings together human character along with human wills, minds and emotions. Many fields of research, including history, are enveloped in understandings of subjectivity as a cultural artifact that varies with time. Hildegard Westerkamp likens our current environmental, social and economic challenges to an opportunity to reflect on personal (subjective) connections in relation to the present situation, as well as the need for individual actions and responsibility to counteract present day imbalances. Hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty, leading one to wonder how those in the near future will perceive our subjective examinations of the current global situation, as well as the wills, minds and emotions that led to those cultural artifacts.
This map-directed, self-paced “digital soundwalk” stirs up subjective and objective particulate matter, and hopefully also action and responsibility, floating in the spaces and places of two of Vancouver’s rapidly evolving neighbourhoods, the False Creek Flats and Olympic Village. Names changes to this area – from Snauq to False Creek – underscore its interstitial nature, with the ebb and flow of social, cultural, economic, colonial and political forces influencing its spatial configurations. Yet our hold over this land is tenuous at best: as artists Rhonda Weppler and Treveor Mahovsky remind with their public artwork A False Creek, the repercussions of climate change and rising tidal waters could potentially undermine and drown out any short-sighted and thin understanding of humankind’s grip on power and control over this area.
Jorma Kujala’s research, carried out through academic and interdisciplinary art practices, are enveloped by theories of identity and the construction of a global cross-cultural “home.” Building on his BFA (Emily Carr University of Art + Design, 2010) and MA (Simon Fraser University, 2016), as well as a process-based art practice that includes painting, drawing, and soundwalking, his PhD studies at SFU have advanced his research in the shared knowledge, identity, memory, and social interaction that occur when culture, communication, and social change intersect. He is currently exploring theories relating to embodiment, phenomenology and performance, and how the human interacts with the non-human, predominantly through his sensory ethnography research, including soundwalking. He also investigates repetition and re-enactment and the bodily interplay between individual, senses, and environment.
This soundwalk is part of Soundwalk September.
Intertidal room – a soundwalk
Sunday, September 27, 2020; 9am and 4pm
Self-guided version also available
Created/led by Jacek Smolicki
Join us for an online artist chat with Jacek Smolicki on Monday, September 28 at 6pm PDT.
REGISTER FOR ARTIST CHAT
Please email Jacek Smolicki at info@para-archives.net if you would like to receive the soundfile and route map for the self-guided version of this soundwalk.
Soundwalk duration: 45 minutes, world premiere.
You must provide your own mobile phone or a portable audio player, and good quality headphones in order to listen to the accompanying audio story. We are unfortunately unable to provide these items due to health and safety concerns.
Please dress appropriately for the weather.
During the pandemic, our sense of hearing seems to have gotten sharper. Urban noises and the disruptive din of everyday life rhythms have given room to more subtle and less easily perceptible soundscapes. In this unstable period an unexpected possibility emerged to rethink how we have been connecting with, affecting, and often exploiting our lived environments on multiple levels. Can attentive listening challenge our ways of inhabiting the world? Can a short moment of aural attention to transient organisms whose lives remain usually imperceptible to us, reconfigure our daily conducts on a personal, collective, or even planetary scale?
Intertidal zones are coastal areas where sea meets the land in a ceaseless interaction of low and high tides. They are characterized by highly diverse ecosystems with multiple inhabitants capable to quickly adapt to these ever-changing conditions.
I have spent the last several months traversing such intertidal zones in and around Vancouver. I have observed and listened to its inhabitants wondering how their diligent compliance to cyclical rhythms of nature can derail our human obsession with the constant growth and progression. My attempts to connect with those intertidal critters and learn from them through attentive listening and creative field recording has quickly become accompanied by other qualitative techniques and historical research, including learning from indigenous perspectives on transformations that affected those zones, their inhabitants and their resilient stewards.
The resulting work is an audio piece intended to be listened to while walking at low tide, solitarily or collectively. It interweaves elements of creative storytelling, historical research creative field recording, and soundscape composition.
The premiere on the September 27 will include a collective walk and listening to the composition as well as a short performance concluding the event. – Jacek Smolicki
This soundwalk is part of Soundwalk September and Culture Days.
This project is part of an ongoing artistic postdoctoral research funded by the Swedish Research Council. It focuses on the history, present and future of soundwalking and field recording practices in the context of environmental humanities, philosophy of technology, and media art. The three-year project is conducted in Sweden at Department of Culture and Society at Linköping University and The School of Arts and Communication at Simon Fraser University (as a guest institution).
Seeking Comfort in Covid Times
Created by prOphecy sun
Launch date: October 4, 2020
Location: Mount Pleasant Alleyways and Beyond
Duration: approx. 60 minutes
Directions on how to take part in this self-guided soundwalk will be posted here on October 4, 2020. They will remain available for you to download so that you can explore the walk in your own time.
Seeking comfort is a 60-minute, self-guided soundwalk that invites participants to stroll, even linger and loiter, and listen to the sounds of Vancouver’s alleys and beyond.
As Frauke Behrendt writes, “soundwalking is a spatio-temporal, embodied, situated, multi-sensory and mobile practice”. Inspired by this and what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as voices possessing a presence that moves and breathes beyond a location, and in particular, Hildegard Westerkamp’s seminal notions on the intermixing of aural ecologies, Seeking comfort encourages listening to the milieu of pandemic life through the lens of public and domestic space.
This soundwalk is part of Culture Days.
WHAT IS A SOUNDWALK?
A Soundwalk is a silent walk along a planned route to experience a location’s ambiance and underlying rhythms. All too often the sounds of the environment pass by unnoticed because of our uncanny ability to shut them out. A Soundwalk invites participants to actively listen, opening ears and consciousness to the complex orchestration that the environment is composing at all times. It is a musical-sonic adventure that reveals the banal to be extraordinary!
Soundwalks are presented by Vancouver New Music in association with Vancouver Soundwalk Collective.
Top photo by prOphecy sun.
