Category Archives: Audio or Sound

Nevin Aladag, Session (2013)

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“Session is a video triptych shot in Sharjah’s urban areas and desert. In this musical composition, different kinds of Arabic, African and Indian percussion instruments, all found in the United Arab Emirates, are played by the elements – the sand, the sea and the wind.”

From Wanderlust catalog: “Aladag’s work explores the textures of socio-spatial environments and global cultural identity. In Sessions we are thus invited to become not only viewers and listeners, but also voyagers and cartographers, navigating the enigmatic edges of our surrounding environments through surfaces and socially activated gestures.”

Kate Gilmore, “Walk the Walk” (2010)

women walking in yellow dresses on a yellow structure

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Like the mazes of office cubicles in so many of the buildings that surround Bryant Park, Walk the Walk comes to life over the course of a working day.

From Monday to Friday, Kate Gilmore’s performance-installation creates a spectacle of color, movement and sound from 8:30am to 6:30pm. Gilmore (b.1975, Washington, D.C.) presents a cubic structure, open on all sides, with a flat roof that functions as a podium. Working in shifts, groups of women take to the roof where they perform an improvisational choreography of everyday movement, such as walking, shuffling, and stomping. Neither professional dancers nor theatrical performers, Gilmore’s participants resemble a random sample of female office workers. They vary in age, race, and body type. Free to perform their artist-assigned task as they choose, they must nevertheless conform to a strict uniform of yellow dresses and beige shoes.

Members of the public are invited to observe the piece from the surrounding Fountain Terrace, but also to enter the open structure. The yellow theme of the women’s dresses continues on both the exterior and interior walls of the structure. Once inside, visitors may hear the reverberating sounds of the movement overhead. In this eccentric concerto of irregular footfalls, the physicality of Gilmore’s performance is experienced anew.

Kate Gilmore is best known for her physically demanding performance videos in which she is typically the sole protagonist. Walk the Walk is Gilmore’s first live public project and also her first to deploy other participants. Her interest in striking and often incongruous images continues in this piece, with its unexpected transformation of architecture, figures, actions, and location. In this way, the artist makes us aware of our assumptions about the codes of appropriate behavior and the limits of self expression. How do the attributes of gender, age, and appearance shape our perception of both social roles and personal desires? In Walk the Walk, Gilmore literally and metaphorically turns the inside out, inviting us into a world at once all too familiar and strangely provocative.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, “Marches” (2005-09)

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Marches, is a project that started in 2005, the work been performed and exhibited for multiple organizations including Transmission Gallery Glasgow, C-E-M Lisbon, Artangel London 2008 and in Italy with Festival di Santarcangelo 2009. The chief concern of this project is to explore the auditory perception of our built environment.

At the centre of the Marches project is a series of performances that take place on the streets of towns and cities. These performances are choreographed marches in which a small group of 10 performers march planned routes through urban districts. These routes are primarily designed to include the most interesting acoustic/architectural dimensions of the town, connecting large halls, domed ceilings, glass walls, narrow corridors, piazzas, crowded spaces etc. The only costume the performers of Marches wear are specific shoes adapted for greater sonic effect, using combinations of hollow stiletto heels, thick wooden heels, tap plates and hobnails to create strange shoes that when stamped emit a sound that works to acoustically define the architectural space through which the wearer travels. The footwear is designed and adapted in collaboration with cobblers and shoe makers, during the Artangel project, the artist undertook a mini residency at Anthony Andrews Special Footwear and Orthotics.

Participants of the performances are choreographed to join and disperse at points of distinctive acoustic interest. Pathways are planned according to the most acoustically exciting way of navigating all the domed roofs, narrow corridors and reflective glass walls offered by the surrounding urban territory. Planning also involves sociological research and historiography; digging into the city’s history to find stories and accounts of parades, processions, marches, trudges and demonstrations. The resulting routes, illustrated in the maps/scores made, were harvested and mapped onto the current city form, intersecting new buildings and extinct pathways to create new navigations of the city.

Marches performances can be heard online here

Photographs here document recent exhibitions of Marches at AUB Art Gallery Beirut 2013 and Caja Madrid Barcelona 2012.

 

Victoria Evans “It Takes a Year to Walk Around the Sun” (2016-17)

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This floor projected video installation offers a disorientating, closely framed, POV experience of walking and provokes a mimetic response in the viewer. The hypnotic, single-camera, rhythmic montage, combined with overlapping layers of diegetic sound, exposes slippages in how we experience time when walking. It Takes a Year to Walk Around the Sun considers the incongruities between notions of scientific, measured, clock time and the non-linear experience of embodied, lived time.

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller “Hillclimbing” (1999)

This is a video work to be watched on a monitor while wearing headphones. Participants hear the artists walking toward the top of a snow-covered hill. We see the ground, the sky, and the couple’s dog. We hear the sounds and occasional talking.

Further reading:

  • “Walk Ways” exhibition catalog. Essay by Stuart Horodner. Foreword by Judith Richards.