The Sound of Mobility - Part 1
I like Iain Borden’s work on skateboarding and the city - it makes a good companion to books like The Answer is Never. And 2001’s ZONE exhibition also takes a nice look at skating, art and architecture.
On the tech side, one of Eyebeam’s recent Distributed Creativity Forums looked at Borden’s work and the possibilities for mobile technologies to function like the ‘tool’ of the skateboard in urban spaces.
Anyway, I was thinking about that and Sonic City: a system that enables people to create music in real time by walking through and interacting with the urban environment. At the same time, I was doing some reading on parkour - or urban freeflow - and spending far too much time staring at kiell’s photos.
I think parkour introduces something new to discussions of mobile technologies: unlike with skateboarding or wearable technologies, the only “device” in use is the human body. [City of Sound recently posted on Fritz Kahn’s 1926 Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) - a lovely take on the body-as-machine metaphor.]
And then it struck me: the (organic) body of parkour’s traceur in-action does not make the same sounds as a skateboard, or Sonic City’s musical-body-machine and, perhaps more importantly, they cannot be heard in the same ways.
Borden writes about the audible aspects of skating, and specifically of their capacity to create urban disorder or disruption, and provide a critique of everyday life in the city. This prompted me to reread Aden Evens’ article “Sound Ideas” (in Shock to Thought) and I came across this quote:
“It is the expression in sound which cannot be measured, the expressive dimension that operates in conjunction with a person, a listener who also brings something to the sound. Where sound involves percepts and affects, where it presents a world, a world one could be in, there only a person can go.”