Abstract
This chapter considers the potential political power of applied agency to be discovered in the soundwalk—simple interactive digital audio performance. It will also examine what we mean by ‘digital’ in performance, and the kinds of agency enabled by properly defined ‘interactivity’, as well as the manner by which political power/agency might be drawn from this work. Sounding out the City therefore presents a taxonomy of interaction as drawn from a background of game design, before considering what the implicit political problems of urban living in the digital age are, before considering the political agency possible through interactive art. Of particular interest is the manner that such art works can represent the city to the urban subject, and invite them to engage with the political and social constructions of contemporary, urban digital technoculture. The chapter closes with a case study: Subtlemobs made by the international arts collective Circumstance. Keywords: Soundwalks, sound art, the city, art, theatre, performance, pervasive, interactive, immersion, immersive, interaction.
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Notes
- 1.
The increasingly networked/digitally enabled physical world—sensors and observations and data that are drawn from bridges or lampposts or litter bins, and connected through the internet.
- 2.
Specifically, a movement which attempts to draw data from as much of one’s existence as possible: sleep patterns, nutrition, exertion, heart rate, blood pressure, mood, location, etc. Used more generally here to also imply those quantifications that are gathered about us by our devices that we don’t necessarily think of as extraordinary: our journeys mapped through Oyster cards, our food purchases saved on loyalty cards, our location recorded by our smart phone’s triangulations, the people with whom we exchange electronic communications.
- 3.
Binaural audio uses a recording technique that, when recording, uses microphones in each ear of a ‘stand-in’ head—this could be an actual person, or an accurate (in terms of density, scale, etc.) mannequin. The stand-in head interrupts the noises picked up by each mic in the same way the head of a listener would experience them in each ear, producing a sound which is uncannily spatially realistic.
- 4.
Also more autonomous compared to the following audience collective of e.g. Slung Low’s headphone show work.
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Nicklin, H. (2018). Sounding Out the City. In: Breed, A., Prentki, T. (eds) Performance and Civic Engagement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66517-7_9
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