WHAT IS NOTOURS? NoTours is a project by the collective, that allows touring a place while living an augmented acoustic experience connected with the actual spaced visited and the rizhomatic situation of the territory involved. This project uses mobile devices based on open source code (Android) as well as GPS technologies (which provides the position of users) and D audio contents (binaural and ambisonics). HOW DOES IT WORK? Using the extended format of touristic audio guides, understanding them as devices giving us information about spaces cataloged as relevant or for the public interest, this project would like to question their real value as well as the official discourses that contain. Our objective is the deconstruction of this old-framed format for designing a new one opened to the collective memory of the inhabitants and connecting it to the real time situation of the city involved. It can be considered as an intervention in the perception of the urban space, understood as a stream of complex actions, as a performance and as an act of collective memory. Between fiction and reality, our focus is the intervention on those strange or familiar territories and converting them into mutant spaces. Touring them under the effects sound will reveal us a hidden city filled of personal stories and interferences. All this, using WIFI and GPS technologies that allow to know the actual position of the visitor as well as the real status of the city in as many layers is possible (temperature, pollution, traffic, news, number of visitants, etc). The use of D audio technologies can provide immerse audio experiences linked to particular spaces and to the extracted data from the environment. WHAT DOES NOTOURS PROPOSE? NoTours proposes a sound-walk through a defined territory, a historical and acoustical journey narrated by protagonists of the territory. NoTours incorporate to this journey sound elements relative to the area where the visitant is located as well as soundart works or other sound elements in relation with the concrete space where the walker is. CONTEXT Every place, as every inhabited space, is loaded with a meaning, with a historical and relational identity that has been made out of an individual or collective process of memory. It is also a result of our listening acts. Each environment or moment are inexorably tied to concrete sounds that characterize, identify and individualize them from the acoustics of other different spaces or contexts. Sound surrounding us or sounds produced by ourselves become an interesting material quite relevant for the artistic creation, anthropology, philosophy, architecture, urbanism, ecology, history, psychology... Evading from the city-panorama model, usually thought as an eminent visual, pan-optic and geometric model, delineated by urbanists and cartographers, it appears for us the necessity of elaborating new sensible itineraries that could question the urban lay out, usually considered as an univocal space. In this context the project proposes a strategy for assuming the complexity of a territory, for understanding how much the sound is informing us about a place and for elaborating new ways of knowledge and expression through our ears. We propose avoiding the usual frontality of the vision with the objective of creating new sensible cartographies of the place that surrounds us.
SOME ANTECEDENTS According to Michel de Certeau a city can be considered as a text written by those that move while doing their habitual itineraries making use of a space that cannot be seen. In 966, the magazine ArtForum publishes Tony Smith s experiences consisting in driving on the surroundings of New Jersey, converting an attitude in form, In the same year, Max Neuhaus paints audience s hands with the message Listen before all them went to a series of defined listening localizations. The mere action of listening becomes a creative act, inheritor of the pan aurality and subversiveness of John Cage. The sound walk is manifested as an improvisation with the sounds of a territory (Andra McCartney), and the listening act merges to the idea of walking as an aesthetic practice completing the analysis that Francesco Careri makes about what he called of nomadic cities, concept that also interested the Letrist Movement, the Land- Art and the new architectonic practices during those years. Proposals like the Otodate itineraries (oto-sound/dateplace) by the artist Akio Suzuki in Berlin, Paris or Torino; sound-walks by Hildegard Westerkamp or Andra McCartney, close to the ecologist premise of the World Sound Scape Project; the proposed walks in City in a Soundwalk by Michelle Nagai using the Extreme Slow Soundwalk derivated from the Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros; the performances by Viv Corringham; the work Blind City by Francisco López, where blind people guide others with blindfolded eyes; the works by Jean-Paul Thibaud and Nicolas Tixier (Parcours commentes and Qualified listening motion) in the CRESSON lab in Grenoble; or the soundwalks by Janet Cardiff have elaborated a set of interesting antecedents in the interference between sonic spheres, many times with high creative overlapping. These are just some examples that can approximate us to a psicogeographic city that is since now manifested as a discontinuous and subjective space. But also, to all this classical projects, we have to add the works by (, Tactical Sound Garden, Always something somewhere else, Sonic City...) that using technological tools have introduced the figure of the data-flaneur, puting the ear, if not in a higher level than the vision, at least in the same importance than the eye, extending the experience of the perception of the city, understood as a reality that multiplies itself in each listening act and that incessantly builds our reality.
sobre la tecnología utilizada... WORKSHOP The workshop/seminar proposes a theoretical and practical approach to the aural phenomena and the sonorous identity of a territory. First from a theoretical point of view, we will study the experience of listening and all the complexities that have affected the development of sound in the history. Later, this workshop will focus on the practical configuration of a digital sonic cartography of a defined territory, materialized in the composition of soundwalks based on GPS localization: we will build a locative media intrument based on our open source plattform. Our objective regarding the workshop is double. First we would like to introduce the participants into the cultural aspects of sounds and the complexity of the act of listening in a defined place (critical - active listening, ear cleaning, etc). Also, we would like to create a working team that could help in the construction and development of the final audio guide. For that, it will be necessary to do a previous selection of the participants: their profiles, expectations and interests. We propose working with students, local artists, etc in the format in order to find enough physical and mental connections to the local universe of sounds and activities of the place.
TEAM [Workshop and artist production] Chiu Longina, anthropologist, sound artist and acoustic spaces creator, is also a member of the production team of IFI, the sound art festival held in Pontevedra, the collective SINSALaudio from Vigo, the association Alg-a and the Centre for Experimental Creation in Cuenca. Chiu Longina is also co-editor of the network projects Mediateletipos.net and Artesonoro.org. Enrique Tomás is an engineer and composer of interactive sound systems interested in sound art and computer music. He has participated in festivals such as Ars Electronica, Sonar, Observatori, to name a few, and currently works in Futurelab and Ars Electronica. Horacio González Degree in Fine Arts and PHD student in Design an Engineering at University of Vigo. Secondary school Teacher in Galicia. He is part of and VHPlab collectives as an artist and a developer. His creative work involves digital error, low technologies, interaction between people and computers. Juan-Gil López is a musicologist and soundartist. Member of the net projects mediateletipos.net, artesonoro.org and escoitar.org. he has developped some interdisciplinary projects about ethnomusicology (music and ethnicity), about contemporary music and about the relationship between sound and Fine Arts. In the recent years he has reserch into aurality, soundscape and the use of evironmental sounds in contemporary art. ABOUT ESCOITAR.ORG is a group of artists and sonic activists working to enhance the acoustic experience (which has historically been overlooked in favour of visuals). They have been co-publishers of projects including Artesonoro.org, Mediateletipos.net and.org, have presented their projects in México (Fonoteca Nacional), Holland (Interference), Germany (ZKM), Italy (Academia de las Artes), the USA (ArtBasel) and at venues in Spain and Portugal including Matadero, Medialab-Prado, LABoral, Artium, CGAC, MARCO, Bòlit and Casa Encendida. 4
PRODUCTION We propose building in three different phases. Phase Phase Final Phase Workshop and first local aural research Specialized interviews, field recordings, etc. Contents processing and mastering. Contents definition (as a result of the workshop) Composition of the narrative of the audioguide. Final tests in the territory. Contact with local communities and important local contents contributors. Initial tests of the audioguide with final contents. Presentation and exhibition. 5
www.escoitar.org www.notours.org 6