Archive
While walking
While walking is a research project headed by Pohanna Pyne Feinberg, who lives currently in Montreal, and did a residency at the Dare Dare centre.
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While Walking is a research project that explores walking as an artistic process and practice. How can walking contribute to the creative process? How can we understand walking as an art form? How does interaction with public space influence walking art practices? In what ways does the urban environment become a source of inspiration, distraction or perhaps intimidation? And, more specifically, what experiences do artists who are women encounter as they make art that involves walking the streets?
While Walking is an opportunity to learn from Montreal-based artists who walk as an aspect of their diverse art practices. Excerpts from recorded conversations with the artists will be shared in the format of an audio walk designed to enable the listener to reflect on the artists’ ideas while walking through the city.” While Walkingproject
Mile-End Soundwalk
On December 6th, members of Soundwalking Interactions, including Andra McCartney, David Madden, David Paquette, and Caitlin Loney, went on a soundwalk around the Montreal neighbourhood of Mile End with sound artist Victoria Fenner. Andra asked me to lead the walk as I live in the neighbourhood. It was dark (around 5pm) and cold, but with no snow on the ground. We began at Andra’s home, walked down the traffic-filled Parc Avenue, cut through a wet alleyway where men removed piles of metal bars from a van, across Bernard West and its small shops and cafes, and down the more residential Waverly, where we heard and saw the wail and flash of emergency vehicles a block away. Once we reached the usually bustling St-Viateur, we came across a very still accident scene in front of popular café Club Social: blocked-off intersection, person on a gurney, ambulance, police cars, fire truck, frozen bystanders. In our conversation minutes later, we all agreed that the soundscape was not what we expected. It had been extremely quiet except for the idling engines of the trucks and a few unrelated conversations passing through the accident zone; it seemed to clash with the flashing lights and intensity of the mood. Andra felt that some of the surreal qualities would probably come through in the recording, which can be heard from about 2:30-3:30.
After our short discussion at the end of St-Viateur, we continued walking around this semi-industrial area, where the wide streets were almost empty and large boxy buildings loom above. David P. remarked that the sound of our footsteps revealed the height of these buildings. As we continued towards the train tracks, a distant bell-like sound caught our attention (5:35-5:55), one of the few acousmatic experiences on the walk, having no visual cue. We guessed the sound had something to do with the trains. Soon after we came across another scene, which Andra later remarked was, like the accident, “strangely intimate” in the middle of a public space. A school bus with a chimney was getting a boost from a van; a steady high-pitch sound followed by a grumbling engine starting. Again, some of us commented on the dissonance between the sonic and visual. Victoria, who noticed a woman with a child tending a barbeque outside the bus, said she did not find the sound story that she expected.
Much of our discussion after the walk kept returning to this issue of visual cues creating expectation during soundwalks. Victoria contemplated,
…the visual and the sound sometimes work against each other, because you expect that you’re going to hear certain things, but sometimes, without the visuals, we wouldn’t know what was happening… so, how do we deal with our eyes when we’re trying to focus on the pure sound so that they don’t lead us to conclusions that are irrelevant to what we’re doing.
Vancouver New Music Soundwalk
On Wednesday, November 9th from 7-8:30pm, Andra McCartney will lead a soundwalk around the English Bay area of Vancouver, hosted by Vancouver New Music. The walk will explore the varied soundscape of this area, made up of shopping areas, beaches, parkland, residential streets and roadways. There will be a discussion before and after the soundwalk.
For more info, please visit Vancouver New Music.
Also, the Vancouver New Music website is offering DIY soundwalk instructions. Follow the link and the site will generate unique soundwalk instructions for you to follow on your next soundwalk. My instructions were:
- Begin listening.
- Go outside.
- Walk — listening — to the nearest shop.
- At your destination, identify the softest sound you can hear. Locate this sound.
This morning, following these instructions, I walked to the corner store nearest to me in the Montreal neighborhood of Mile-End where I live. On the way, I heard distant metal-on-concrete drilling, buzzing chainsaw glissandos, the swell of near and far traffic, a bass-heavy pop song in Doppler effect from a speeding car, and the crazed squeals of recess as I passed a grade school. Inside the isolated soundscape of the small store, I listened closely for the first time out of hundreds of visits: a quiet, two-way greeting with the owner (both in our second language); the loud clang of the metal bell behind me; radio music with intermittent static; and dense layers of refrigerated hum. The softest noise I hear is glass clinking. It’s coming from behind the industrial fridge doors; most likely the owner’s son (it is only ever the owner or his son who work there, everyday, from 9am to 11pm) restocking beer.
George Bures Miller
George Bures Miller (born 1960) is a Canadian artist who lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Grindrod, BC. He is Janet Cardiff’s longtime collaborator. Together the two have put together numerous international solo and group exhibitions, “smaller works,” installations and publications. Their work has been featured in numerous books, including The Secret Hotel (2005), The Killing Machine and Other stories 1995-2007 (2007), and The House of Books has no Windows (2008). Recent installations include Ship O’ Fools (2010), The Carnie (2010), The Cabinet of Curiousness (2010), and Storm Room (2009).
Soundwalking Interactions is particularly interested in Miller and Cardiff’s numerous audio and video walks, which Cardiff has been producing since at least the early 1990s, beginning with Forest Walk (1991). Their last major walk project was Jena Walk (Memory Field) (2006), a commission from the Culture Department of the City of Jena, Germany. This is how they describe the walk: A walk is an act of contemplation. For this walk the visitors were taken on a journey over a pastoral landscape where the battle between the Prussians and Napolean took place 200 years ago… Time slips from one century to another as the listener walks, aware of their feet on the earth and the wind on their face. They will be aware that they are walking on the site just as others have walked over the same earth the last two hundred years, their stories mixing with those in the past.
For more information on their projects and many collaborations, go to: www.cardiffmiller.com
Soundwalk at IPMC Conference
On June 5, 2011, Andra McCartney led a soundwalk during the ‘Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Music in Canada’ conference held at Mount Allison University, Sackville, New-Brunswick. This clip includes a short montage of the soundwalk followed by excerpts from the post-walk discussion. Audio recording and photography: Andra McCartney. Editing and montage: David Paquette.