User:Anita!/Final presentation

Special Issues

SI 22

Strawberry Cake broadcast with Mania and Wang We focused on exploring connections of movement, sound, and field recordings. We were wondering how can movment be translated and shown through radio?

Sound, field recordings of public space and movement

Hitchhikers broadcast with Rosa and Thijs. We were exploring interactivity with audience, by making a radio broadcast in which the partecipation of the audience was necessary to continue telling the story.

Agency, and interaction with the audience

For the launch, I worked on the 'curtain', a sewn modular archive as an element to 'safekeep' and protect the different projects, sounds and survival tools that were created for the SI.

Containers for sound

SI 23

During this Special Issue I started exploring sewing as a research method, quilting as a way of connecting thoughts and ideas.

Fabric as research method

For the launch at Varia, I worked with Bernadette, Maria and Alessia on loading... feminist server, we focused on the connection between digital and physical interfaces, making a game that required input from both sides.

Connection between digital and physical

SI 24

My focus really started to shift more into what I researched in the second year with the final project. I worked on several projectes, and I was super inspired by the special issue classes. I started mapping rotterdam theugh sound, and translated this into. I moved all around the city, recording everything, listened back, took notes and them sewed them together into an abstract map.

Mapping and listening

I also built a small device measuring loudness, and threugh it listened to an area in my neighbourhood. I then used that to knit a small patch of fabric, based on the threshold sound or no sound.

Listening in the city

For the launch I worked with Mania on Scripts to read the City. I also worked on 'Scripts to read the City' with Mania, a publication containing a series of scripts to look and listen in public space. The project imagines an urban environment that can be read, analyzed and criticized as a text. By reading the city in this way we find other possible ways of seeing, moving and listening. In a scripted city, marked by escalating levels of perfection, efficiency and control, the emancipatory aspects of urban life are undermined, allowing little room for anything that doesn't fit the image of the "norm".

Scripts to Read the City is an attempt to foster diverse experiences and uses of space, similar to a theater script interpreted differently by each actor. The tools of navigation are a device indicating which character to play and a guide, including a set of directions and instructions.

The project explores a relation between scripts and spontaneity, chance and control, and how scripts and unpredictability can enhance each other, stimulating imagination, encouraging us to engage with space from another perspective.

other things

Scripts to read the city was brought forward as a project from Mania and me, and we hosted more workshops at SIGN as a part of Spread Zinefest in Groningen and at Manifest:io in Berlin.

This was particularly interesting in realizing how different each time this workshop is hosted is, and to notice how different people connect to the reaserch. I had many interesting conversations that contributed to the development of my research for the second year as well.

research and thesis

In my thesis 'Textured Listening' I write and reaserch listening in the context of public space. I wrote about walking and listening as research practices, smooth cities and theme park cities, but most importantly, about my own listening practice development. A key part of the research to me, was field research itself, which involved sitting and practicing slow, repetitive, stituated and embodied listening.

Listening is an embodied and situated practice. Perceiving

sound is not limited to what is heard, but it spans much

further. Think for example of the vibrations you feel when

you stand next to a loud speaker, realizing the physical

aspect of sound, or the overwhelming discomfort of hearing

an extremely loud noise, involving the mind and body, the full

being, the whole self. This is why I call listening embodied.

Listening is a practice that helps reveal hidden threads

of sound, focusing on the texture of the variations only

you as yourself can perceive and notice. It is routed in the

subjectivity of the listener being the curator of what is heard,

they decide what to perceive. Listening is not passive, but

an active and conscious effort. Sound is created, it does not

just exist independently of its context, and it considers how

human and non-human components of these surroundings

relate to each other. It considers the relationship between

the individual and the context they are listening in. It is an

approach to understand your city (or a space in the city)

through sound. This is why I call listening subjective.

Bound thesis, ready for the grad show.

Graduation Project

The final project 'Caught Sounds' is an interactive textile and sound installation. The sounds caught in it are field recordings of a Rotterdam square in my neighbourhood that I will not name. The textile was entirely hand wolven by me, using a mixure of conductive and wool thread.

When a visitor touches the fabric, depending on the location of the touch, a different recording will be played. The order in which sounds are placed is the order in which they were recorded.

You 'read' the sounds, left to right. If you reach the end, you have listened to a lot of what I have. I show my journey in developing my listening practice through this, and issue an invitation to develop one yourself.

This will be acompanied by a listening walk I will host on Saturday during the gradshow.

public moment one

For the first public moment, I wanted to test movement and touch in silence, look into memory and sound. I asked visitors to wear headphones, move and compose a path between the screenprinted sound annotations I had made.

public moment two

At the Leeszaal public moment, I wanted to test ways for people to be able to listen deeply and in a concentrated way. I played a series of field recordings I recorded in a square in my neighbourhood. I built a paper tent in which they could sit in, and read annotations I had made while listening to the recordings printed on the inside walls.

production

Recording, weaving, coding and soldering