THE NEW LIQUIDITY

De-territorialized

Listenings

De-territorialized Listenings is an ongoing series of site- specific binaural soundwalks, seeking to challenge the hierarchies of our sensorial and imaginative structures, which are 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. The project intertwines re- search from several fields of study: sound and media art, art in public space, the field of locative media and technology, and the field of sensory studies and emotional geographies.

By transforming familiar soundscapes and inducing a “mobility of the self”, the project addresses deterritoriali- zation in the context of cultural globalization and distancing from the locality through mediatization, migration and commodification of life under the global capital.

De-territorialized Listenings proposes a technologically driven yet poetic experience, where real-life auditory events are replaced, juxtaposed and intervened in by parallel sonic environments, narratives and compositions. A custom-built mobile AR app utilizes both the phone’s gyro and accelerometer data to track a walker’s local positions, body angles and movements, as well as geotagging to trigger sound events in the larger geographical realm.

De-territorialized Listenings is part of Project Anywhere’s 2022 Global Exhibition Program for art at the outermost limits of location-specificity, and is realized in collaboration with The Centre of Visual Arts (University of Melbourne) and Parsons School of Design (The New School, New York).

The development of the project’s both technical and theoretical framework was made possible through the kind support of:

• BBK Berlin/Neustart Kultur - Innovative Kunstprojekte
• The Swedish Arts Grants Committee
• Berliner Senat
• Fonds Darstellende Kunste/Neustart Kultur -TakeHeart Rechercheförderung
• Project Anywhere Global Exhibitiion Program 2022

De-territorialized Listenings: (more info)

An Archive of Collapsed

Collective Memory

Use headphones to llsten to a redacted version of the artwork

^{Site-specific, interactive}

^{binaural soundwalk}

^{Between Ebb and Flow

- Interstitial Spaces Festival
Moorburg / Hamburg, Germany}

^{# Unity 3D-built Mobile AR-app
Android Phones with
3D Audio}

^{Stereo Headphones}

For the festival betweenEbbandFlow: interstitial spaces, The New Liquidity investigated the harbour as a metaphorical space of transition and transcorporeality within a hydrofeminist and posthumanist discourse. Their interactive sonic intervention took place at the Kattwyk bridge, next to the highly politicized Moorburg coal power plant, both stark symbols for the eviction and transformation of the entire Moorburg and Altenwerder areas into industrial harbour areas. The further enabling of container terminals and chemical industries dumping toxic waste into both the Südelbe as well as the North Sea caused irrepairable environ- mental harm and robbed thousands of people of their homes.

The bridge becomes a non-place for a displaced community and proof of inequities ascribed to late capital- ism and high modernist schemes of constant growth. As one follows the route across the water, the artwork invites us to question the spaces we encounter, integrating landscape and subjectivity. What can reengage- ment with this non-place tell us about our sense of place and what kind of impact does it have on our collective memory?