Sonic Bodies_ speculation #3

In the fall of 2019 researchers at Concordia University’s Performative Urbanism Lab (PULSE) undertook a project to engage with acoustic urban ecologies and the ways that sound(s) locate them in space and time. The interdisciplinary research-creation team is made up of artist-researchers with backgrounds in the fields of urbanism, performance, design, architecture, spatial and sound art practices.

The key interlocutor for this project is Gorilla Park, an irregular shaped parcel of land located on a disused railway track, in a Montreal neighbourhood called Marconi-Alexandria, currently a rapidly gentrifying quarter of the city. The uneven development in this part of the city is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies.

This unfolding and iterative approach to sustaining collaboration has also become a mode to experiment with performative methods of artistic research taking place in contested urban spaces; foregrounding the use of bespoke sound devices and 360˚ video recordings, to situated methods such as walking, and hacking Google Earth imagery.