Listening to each other / Einander zuhören – Stadt – (Ge)Schichten was a sound project, simultaneous happening in Athens, Dresden and Essen involving researchers, sound artists, art students and collectives of the cities.
Through workshops and creative collaboration we accomplished to explore the relation between residents and their sonic environment by creating a series of sound maps and soundwalks. The result was an acoustic cartography about places, people and their mutual connections. The project was based on the open-source locative media platform “noTours”, that accommodates interactive and site-specific sound narratives.
The perception of space was transformed through the creation of an augmented aurality, while wandering within an aurally augmented city revealed inaudible soundscapes and personal narratives.
The project resulted 600 recordings that resulted in ten different soundwalk-areas over the whole city centre of Athens, offering the walker/listener the possibility to wander through them on an intuitive and non-linear way, by using noTours, a locative media platform that facilitates creation of sound walks that are intuitive, allowing re-composition of the soundscapes through chosing own trajectories by the walkers, creating with every walk a new sound experience.
Evading from the city-panorama model, usually thought as an eminent visual, pan-optic and geometric model, delineated by urbanists and cartographers, the artists elaborated new sensible itineraries that question the urban lay out, usually considered as an univocal space.
The project was curated by noTours member Geert Vermeire and was accomplished with the collaboration with escoitar.org and Fonés collectives.
Artists in Athens: Zoi Arvaniti, Marios Vouros, Sofia Grigoriadou, Maria Methimaki, Dana Papachristou, Parasyri Mariza, Poka, Stefanos Souvatzoglou. University of Thessaly: Isavella-Dimitra Karouti, Antonia Lappa, Rodoula Monaki, Melina Bona. Fonés Collective: Nikos Bubaris, Nina Pappa, Elpida Rikou, Giorgos Samantass, developed in sound walks in Athens.
Artists in Aachen/Dresden: Margot Dieleman, Stefaan van Biesen and Eric Windey / WIT Urban Team, Karolin Killig and professor Claudius Lazzeroni, Folkwang Art University of Essen, developed into the project “Kybernetische Klangobjekte – interaktive Klang – Graffitis im öffentlichen Raum” presented in the exhibition Media Art Fair / C.A.R. Contemporary Art Ruhr 2013.
A project produced by the Goethe Institut and presented during ICMC/SMC 2014