SF Lunchwalk: West

A traveler on this new island, my first forays radiate out from the center.  At 12:36 pm, I start walking due west.

Not a few moments pass before I am pressed up against fellow travelers, compressed in the space of the city, stacked like the bricks around us.  A clicking signal indicates to the blind, such as yourself, that a street crossing is permitted by the local authorities.  Let loose once again up the concrete walk, I slip around pedestrians along my strict course of travel.

This staccato pedestrian pace of long strides along the blocks and standing still at the corners is the dominate rhythm of a city walk.  Giving in to this rhythm does not preclude the variety of encounters--spatial, social, sensorial--which are possible.  The corner of a block leads to collisions between unlikely actors.  The frictionless straightaway, on the other hand, permits a certain isolation, allowing me to observe and record a singular cut through the cityscape.

These blocks of buildings form larger groups of blocks with distinguishable characteristics (tall buildings, hard surfaces, voids of parking garages, etc).  These groups may form called districts or neighborhoods, but I abandon those artificial boundaries.  Look, listen, to the physical properties which unite them.  This walking radius is an island: the order it contains is the order I have given it.  By walking through the heterogeneous clusters of built and un-built space, I produce an organization.  I organize space by walking through it.  Then recording sound and reassembling that sound into a single track, I attempt to illuminate that order, to give clarity to it through a language of sound.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk: West by nicksowers

At the beginning of the track, I am compressed on a corner.  Layers of travelers cross over me, vehicles shred the space of the possible, and a man with a cane bends over talking to a woman inside her car with a small dog in the driver's seat.  An open-deck tour bus with the driver's well-beaten narrative, amplified, is momentarily captured by my microphones before disappearing off the edge of the map.  Above my head taps a hand against the stucco face of a building to a beat independent of the street.  Shrill brakes and electric bus straw snapping, the volume thickens.

Cars roar up and down an artery named after Van Ness.  They drown out the layering of space, flattening the sonic sphere momentarily until I cross it.  Walking further up, a slight increase in elevation, and I find a tennis court.  Leaf blowers signify greater affluence.

Later, at a two-block wide park, at the boomerang moment on the walk, I welcome the great depth of field. Hills to the south are visible with their own little orchestras of sirens and cars tinny like the sound from a miniature train model.   At the park, space releases itself from a tight coil.  The aural vista opens wide. The city is out there.

SF Lunchwalks

Lunch break. Got an hour? Take a walk. Inside of a thirty-minute radius, an infinitely detailed (though finitely bound) landscape is within reach.

SF Lunchwalks: Morsel of San Francisco which I can reach in a one-hour roundtrip from my office.

SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks is the first in a series of soundwalks, where I take a walk for an hour instead of eating lunch (or eat lunch while walking). My goal is to record the sounds of a unique slice of the city, to hear the city anew through the stereo microphones of my Zoom H4n recorder.

On this first soundwalk I am looking for cracks between buildings. When I find one, I stick the recorder in there.

 Giant cracks exist too, beneath freeways, where freeways unfold, colliding ever so slowly.  Listen:

 SF Lunchwalk 01 : Cracks by nicksowers 

Death by Stereo

Edgar Frog: I think I should warn you all, when a vampire bites it, it's never a pretty sight. No two blood suckers go out the same way. Some yell and scream, some go quietly, some explode, some implode. But, all will try and take you with them.

The Revolution will not be Amplified

A mobile loudspeaker array

Something like what you see above will not be found around the #occupy movements growing in cities around the globe.  An amplified platform, broadcasting a clear and distinct message, is fittingly absent.  It is not permissible by many of the occupied downtown neighborhoods, nor is it even necessary as a technology for these groups to express themselves.

The NYPD requires a Sound Device Application, plus 45 dollars per day, to use amplified sound in a public space.  This includes battery-powered bullhorns.  While numerous groups have applied for permits, it stands within reason that the NYPD is not going to be granting any permits to the Occupy Wall Street movement. How is one to speak to a crowd of hundreds?

Free and requiring no permit is the human microphone. Anyone who has heard one of the celebrities speaking to the crowds will be familiar with its odd cadence and glitchy translations.  The concept is incredibly simple: a group of people who can hear the speaker simply repeat what was said, causing speech to move at a slow and deliberate pace.

Corporate art as sound amplification near Liberty Park, NY  (edited; orginal by Cryptome)

While the human microphone is an awesome, almost church-like display of the power of a group, it is worth thinking about how the built context of a protest group might assist in the un-powered amplification of speech.  We know from stages and well-designed lecture halls that reflective surfaces near the speaker amplify sound.  The same principles can be taken outside.  The above image caught my attention when I realized that corporate art is often made of large, hard surfaces.  This group of activists found a 'natural' site of sound amplification and gathered around it.

In lieu of being approved for one of those amplified sound permits, perhaps Occupy Wall Street or any number of Occupy movements around the country should solicit pro bono advice from an acoustics engineer at the Arup SoundLab.  Or better yet, find a blind person.  Acoustic wayfinding helps the blind use sound reflections to navigate urban space.  There might be hidden sweet spots in some of these parks and plazas that would help amplify the human microphone.

Slavoj Zizek and the Human Microphone (edited; original by Cryptome) 

I was watching Slavoj Zizek's human-microphone-amplified speech and what struck me most were not his words but the situation of my watching the video.  This video, with the recording taken from somewhere in the middle of a giant human microphone, left the impression of the crowd generating the words, and the speaker with his tiny voice becoming anonymous.

To top it off, next to the human microphone video was a google ad for a loudspeaker array, from a company called TVi Audio.  The slogan? "Experience the Revolution".