Where I’m going

Sounding the Infra-ordinary is going places.

The first attempt at collaborative soundwalk documentation will take place on September 20, 2009 for ConfluxCity in NYC. The walk will begin in Tompkins Square Park and end at Washington Square Park. More details will be forthcoming shortly.

I will be listening to the Newcastle Ocean Baths and giving a site-specific reading there on October 1, 2009 as part of the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle, Australia.

Also at This is Not Art, I will be giving a presentation on the overall project-in-progress on October 2, 2009.

Sounding the Infra-ordinary is a vagabond.

Hello.

Hello, my name is Sounding the Infra-ordinary.

I have created this space to post thoughts about, documentation of, and event information for my new project “Sounding the Infra-ordinary: A Phonography of Everyday Life.”

Below, you will find the plan of the project, which initially stems from a desire to hone my listening and writing abilities while exploring how different modes of documentation affect our perceptions of the world. Also below is an excerpt from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces that I adapted for some of the preliminary listening exercises I have undertaken this summer.

Thus far, I have conducted several solitary soundwalks and experimented with a few modes of documentation. As I continue to conduct this research, I plan to begin posting some of the results here. The goal of this first stage of the project ultimately is to document both the development of my listening skills as well as the development of modes of written documentation inspired by Perec, among others.

For the next stage of the project, I will be organizing collaborative documented soundwalks that explore the personal/communal experience of listening to and within the everyday. I will be posting information about such events here, and sharing audio, visual, and literary documentation.

Yes, there will be a lot going on in this exploratory undertaking. This space will become a world unto its own.

Welcome!

Plan of the Project

Attesting to the acoustic environment’s essential role in the constitution of physical, social, and existential space, the art of phonography (“sound writing”) captures sound’s unique capacity to document the complex network of encounters that define our experience of the world. This experiential research project explores the ways that the mediation of sound fundamentally alters our relationship to the acoustic environment, and how acts of “sound writing”—considered here as both as audio field recordings and as experimental writing practices—may be used to develop an ethics of imaginative listening that reconsiders the sonic experience of everyday life.

This research is still in a very early stage of development. In this first stage of the project, I am attempting to literarily mediate the acoustic environment via short, plainly descriptive experimental writing practices inspired by Georges Perec’s series of practical writing exercises in the essay collection Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Encompassing various approaches to chronicling the intimate and public spaces of his Parisian neighborhood, Perec utilized a combination of exhaustive, objective description and more personal reminiscences of the minutiae that compose everyday life, foregrounding the "infra-ordinary" as the material contexts through which existential life reveals itself. As Perec’s work emphasizes visual aspects of everyday environments and the complex network of relationships therein, he leaves the acoustic environment relatively unexplored. Thus, I am adapting his experimental writing models to the sonic experience by documenting a series of soundwalks in order to attempt to develop a literary equivalent to audio field recording that may be capable of tuning the reader’s ear to a form of clairaudience ("heightened listening") activated in the imagination.

Practical Exercises

(adapted from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces)

Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps.
Apply yourself. Take your time.
Note down the place,
the time,
the weather.

Note down what you can hear. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to hear what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you?
Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to hear.

You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.

Force yourself to hear more flatly.

…

Carry on.
Until the scene becomes improbable
Until you have the impression, for the briefest of moments, that you are in a strange town or, better still, until you can no longer understand what is happening or is not happening, until the whole place becomes strange, and you no longer even know that this is what is called a town, a street, buildings, pavements…