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)

Impulse

(in development)

Site-specific, interactivebinaural soundwalk
From Metropolis to Ecopolis
Københavns Internationale Teater, Copenhagen, Denmark 2024
# Unity 3D-built Mobile AR-app
Android Phones with 3D AudioStereo Headphones

At Københavns Internationale Teater’s/Metropolis’ residency ”From Metropolis to Ecopolis” on Refshaleøen The New Liquidity took the first steps in further exploring the interactive framework of their ongoing project De-territorialized Listenings. Previous iterations of the project have been focused on giving each participant individual agency of their own site-specific immersive experience through the act of walking, and during previous fellowships at The Centre for Human-Computer Interaction/Salzburg among others, the duo has with various means also investigated and challenged the notion of site representation.

At Metropolis the duo turned towards the liminal triadic overlap between individual agency, collective interaction/performativity and site specificity. Can collective agency manifest itself through the specific historic and social layers of a place? To what extent will the notion of place disrupt or strengthen the collective bind and vice versa? During three intense research weeks the very first methodological building stones for a more performative interactive framework were laid out through a series of trials and workshops, based on different notions of borders and real versus imaginary landscapes. In its final version the duo envisions the juxtaposition of several narratives which at certain points converge in physical space through participant interaction.