Shuffle city
Walk/Shuffle by Emmet Connolly
“Walk/Shuffle investigates a method of reappropriating technology to realign the experience of the journey in an urban environment, and reinterpret the space occupied between cartesian points as a series of spatial events.
The urban traveler is too often concerned only with destination, treating the journey itself as secondary. I concentrate on the personal stereo (in particular the ubiquitous and culturally iconic iPod) as something that is increasingly used to block out the experiential nature of traveling through an urban space - in the street, on the subway, etc. Technology is used to recede further from experience. Familiar playlists are used to gain a sense of control in the potentially hostile space of the city, and a comfortable distance is achieved. Yet by receding into the private world afforded by headphones and habitual music, much that the visceral city has to offer is lost, and the space between source and destination goes largely unnoticed.
I wish to facilitate a reversal of this process, and by using this technology in a way that it was not intended, encourage an interaction with urban environment, and a refreshing departure from destination-focused walking. In the tradition of psychogeography, participants are given an MP3 playlist of seperate audio instructions giving directions on where to walk to within an urban environment. The playlist is played in ’shuffle mode’, resulting in a random set of directions, forcing the participant to relinquish control of their route to the same technology that is often used to moderate the urban walk. Silence between instructions highlights the fact that external sounds exist even while wearing headphones. The focus of the walk shifts from an individual’s movement in geographic space to the series of events occurring over time.
The hour-long walk was carried out by a number of individuals in differnt cities across the world at 2pm GMT, Saturday 2nd April 2005, all engaging in similar and related spatial experience regardless of location. During the walk, participants were asked to record their experiences, which may then form a collaberative map according to time and event, emphasising the importance of experience over place.”
Emmet also keeps an interesting blog worth checking in on.
November 2nd, 2005 at 5:26 am
These days I’m always in a rush - perhaps a fast-forward function on the MP3 player might suit me better - analogue technology still has its advantages.
November 3rd, 2005 at 8:55 am
It seems you might need to slow down then, and I don’t think fast-forwarding is going to help with that