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)

Memento
Maritsa

Site-specific, interactive
binaural soundwalk

  Context AiR
Plovdiv, Bulgaria

 # Unity 3D-built Mobile AR-app
Android Phones with 3D Audio
Stereo Headphones


As a part of their ongoing series De-territorialized Listenings for ContextAiR Plovdiv, The New Liquidity and Voin de Voin present a site-specific intervention focused on the river Maritsa. The river constitutes the largest unused public space of Plovdiv, making it into one of the most desolate places in the city, largely forgotten by its inhabitants. The water of Maritsa not only arrives to Plovdiv filled with ancient as well as current impressions of deterritorialization, it has also witnessed both individual and collective histories by Bulgarian as well as Roma communities.

By staging a performative and sonic intervention at the river banks and temporarily transforming it to an explorative mnemonic site, the artwork seeks to bring the river back to its inhabitants. A river only becomes valuable to people once it becomes part of their habits, memories and rituals, attributing emotional value to the local community. Our conceptions of water have a direct bearing on how we treat it, influencing our ideas about what it can accomplish and how it endlessly should serve us. The water emergency is also a social emergency.





By deconstructing archival recordings from Bulgarian folklore songs for the Peperuda rain rituals, The New Liquidity created a poetic sonic journey incorporating a soundwalk along the river bank as well as Voin de Voin’s ritualistic offerings to the river in interaction with the participants. By juxtaposing old and new watery imaginaries, can we rethink our corporeal relation to water in order to create new past and future potentials? By seeing the river as a deep archive the artists want to show how water extends embodiment in time - from one body to the other, connecting us not only with our own bodies, but with other bodies/ bodies of water.

 

Performance Artist Voin de Voin greeting participants at the river bed with ritualistic offerings.