The New Liquidity

Residency Programme: November 2021

Cruce Programme: May 2022

DE-TERRITORIALIZED LISTENINGS

De-territorialized Listenings is a series of site-specific binaural soundwalks, seeking to challenge the hierarchies of our sensorial and imaginative structures, often limited and preconditioned due to the human tendency for habituation and adaptation. Using adaptive spatial audio, reactive to the participant’s body movements and location, these soundwalks strive to facilitate a sonic psychogeographic dialogue with a site. De-territorialized Listenings does not only propose a transformation of familiar soundscapes by inducing a mobility of the self, but addresses deterritorialization in the context of cultural globalization and distancing from the locality developed through mediatization, migration and commodification of life under the global capital. While deterritorialization speaks of the loss of the natural relation between culture and the social and geographic territories, these soundwalks focus on a dialogue with historical, social and geographical contexts by valuing and rethinking local knowledge and environments. Through direct interaction with the local community, combined with geographical, historical and material research on-site, these soundwalks explore the intimate and collective memories, as well as the ones ingrained in the site.

De-territorialized Listenings is a technically driven immersive experience, where real-life auditory events are juxtaposed with, replaced, and intervened by parallel sonic environments, narratives and compositions. A custom-built AR app for mobile phones utilizes both the phone’s gyro as well as accelerometer data to track a walker’s local positions, body angles and movements, as well as geolocation pins in correlation with GPS signals to trigger sound events in the larger geographical realm. Applying these multiple data inputs to provide narrative triggers as well as direct participant/walker-defined sequencing of audio events, the artwork tries to offer fresh entry points to facilitate different layers of an active embodiment of spatial coordinates. For the Open Studio, Selma and Anders are showing work in progress focused on the ongoing development of their soundwalk app, more specifically how to cadence a narrative through the participative interaction with the step counter of the mobile phones. Their final work will be presented through an immersive outdoor soundwalk experience at Centro Negra in April 2022.

The residency was possible with the kind support of the Swedish Arts Committee.