Sonic Bodies_ speculation #2

In the fall of 2019, as a collective of researchers with Concordia University’s Performative Urbanism Lab (PULSE), we undertook a project to engage with acoustic urban ecologies and the ways that sound(s) locate us in space and time. Our key urban interlocutor was Gorilla Park, an interstitial and irregular shaped parcel of urban 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 of this site is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies. Gorilla Park emerged as a name for this post-industrial site following years of community mobilization, pressuring the City of Montreal to expropriate the so-called vacant strip of land from real-estate developers.

Our initial encounter with Gorilla Park prompted us to problematize current trends towards connectivity and mediated urban environments, generally predicated upon a ‘digital agenda,’ wherein the privileged position of ‘smart’ and intelligent technologies is being furthered. In a site driven by algorithmic governance we reflected upon the affective immaterial presence of data surveillance in the reshaping and planning of urban spaces (writ large). In this sense, our approach to understanding plans for Gorilla Park’s development is one that embraces the performative as an agonistic or counter-hegemonic practice to urban planning. In this context, Brandon LaBelle’s notion of sonic agencies and his figure of the “overheard” (2018) afforded us a radical and political approach towards listening, thereby “unsettl[ing] and exceed[ing] arenas of visibility by relating us to the unseen, the non-represented or the not-yet-apparent” acoustic agencies (both human and non-human) shaping Gorilla Park’s present and future. As such we attempted to overhear the more or less invisible forms of data circulating throughout the site by sampling sound recordings and the conversations we shared while collectively walking in the site.

To do this we used BICHO, a DIY prosthetic hearing device designed to augment spatial explorations by making audible unheard frequencies and signals. Using a mixer, a sampling machine and a speaker, BICHO allowed for the simultaneous operation of the following sources: a telephone pickup repurposed as an electromagnetic sensor; a contact clip microphone that captures the vibrations of objects and surfaces, and a sound recorder to amplify subtle mechanical sound waves. As a bespoke wearable artifact BICHO is both a performative tool and musical instrument, actively affording the wearer/performer to intervene in augmenting urban acoustic ecologies by generating feedback, detecting, capturing, and disrupting frequencies through operations like modulation or distortion.

with any mediated works, the final form of the audio and visual material foregrounds multiple iterations of a much messier and entangled series of urban questions, conversations, theoretical explorations, and performatives. As such, we seek to unfold, and make intelligible fragments of a larger collective and critical engagement with methods of undertaking performative urban research within the contested spaces of cities.

The interdisciplinary research-creation team who participated in this project are made up of artist-researchers and scholars with backgrounds in the fields of urbanism, performance, design, architecture, spatial and sound art practices.