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



news            text          contact


De-territorialized Listenings: (more info)

Fade in by Water
Drown Out by Wind

Site-specific
Sound Installation

In Ruins AiR
Casignana

 # Android Phones
Transducers, Amplifiers
Water, Contact Microphones


During their second stay at the ”In Ruins” residency, this time at Villa Romana di Casignana, The New Liquidity worked along two parallel yet inversed trajectories, preparing a on-site sonic intervention with pre- composed sounds, as well as collecting a variety of multichannel audio material for a future off-site installation.

In the Roman thermal baths of the Villa, situated above the E90 national road which cuts the still active archeological site in two, a sonic inter- vention was staged intended to regenerate fleeting traces of an absent past in order to play with the intimacy of a different possible reality. Given the unexcavated part of the site continues out into the sea, water was chosen as the material and transductional element with which to interact with the site. Over the millenia the flow and rise of the Medi- teranean salt water has turned the mosaic into thin semi-opaque veil to the past, lifted only by the addition of fresh water which momentarily brings the colors back to life.









On the second eastern residential remains, the focus lay on a detailed collection of sonic material, such as the wind blowing through the scaffolding protecting the site, which will provide the basis for an off-site multichannel sound installation during 2023. By capturing and reenacting the soundscape of Villa Romana, the aim is to give a glimpse into layers of the past containing stories from an absent and de- constructed historical landscape.

The entropy of these ruins is understood in terms of their suspended existence between nature and culture, past and future, and will serve as a starting point of a research focused on how the voices of this precarious landscape can help us rethink issues concerning site, heritage, materiality and history.