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)

The Sound

of Ruins

Site-specific, interactive
binaural soundwalk

AADK / Centro Negra
Blanca / Murcia, Spain

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

During their residency at AADK/Centro Negra in Blanca, Murcia, Spain, The New Liquidity focused on exploring and listening to the sound of ruins not only to rescue a forgotten past but to reveal displaced memories of their petrified landscape. Through direct interaction with the local community (i.e recorded interviews and discussions) combined with geographical, historical and material research on-site, the artwork explored the intimate and collective memories, as well as the ones ingrained in the site in question by facilitating a dialogue through the act of walking.

These ruins are not only relics of abandonment and decay, but portals into the recent histories, intimate and collective memories and diverse experiences of nostalgia. How can the voices of this precarious landscape help us rethink issues concerning site, heritage, materiality and history? And how can these ambiguous sites allow creation of alternative and involuntary memories that will contribute to the considerations of the future in the light of critical and emerging ecologies?

Spanish Painter and Blanca inhabitant Pedro Cano (above), locals Anna, Manuel, Rosa and Esther Monasterio - the architect of Centro Negra, some of whom were interviewed for their oral conntributions to the artwork.