LABoral offers its visitors ten “sound walks” in which -with the use of a mobile equipped with the Android operating system- they will be able to have many different experiences in the surrounding areas of the Art Centre. The majority of these works have been produced in the Spatial Narratives workshop, held in the first week of November as part of the programme at Plataforma Cero, the LABoral Production Centre. From this Friday 25 November, they are available to the public, which will be able to discover and experience the narrative fictions proposed to them by some of the writers and visual artists who participated in this research process.

Centred on the exploration of geolocalised audio, the Spatial Narratives workshop broadens a line of work developed by the Art Centre since its very opening. Through a variety of works presented in exhibitions and other initiatives, different sound cartography proposals have been produced.

Geolocalised audio is the capacity to locate a sound in a physical space and reproduce it when the users –equipped with a Smartphone or a similar device- find themselves physically present in this place. Locative audio creates virtual sound spaces superimposed over the physical world and has multiple uses: from tourist guides to targeted advertising onto navigation aids for the blind, the exchange of audio files and the reclamation of these spaces.

The Spatial Narratives programme consists of a meeting, the exhibit which is now being presented and two residencies – one in development and the other in artistic research – and sets out to explore the artistic, narrative and imaginative use of audio geolocalisation tools, especially the noTours platform, intersecting literature and sound.

From 17 October to 8 November, Enrique Tomás, a member of Escoitar.org and one of the main developers of this platform for the creation of sound compositions and narratives, noTours, worked at Plataforma Cero to create a version “one”, in connection with a workshop to be held at LABoral.

In addition, for an artist residency call for the production of a work, the Art Centre launched an international proposal call, which selected Helena Torres Sbarbati, who on the basis of this meeting has begun to develop her own locative audio project Serendipia [Serendipity]. Helena Torres proposes an investigation centred in Gijón which puts together an acoustic historical drift through Sucu cemetery in order to have an interactive experience, creating dialogues which build bridges between the past and present, history and personal destinies, power and territory.

AN APPLICATION BY ESCOITAR.ORG
The more than 20 participants in the workshop learned how to use the different technical resources, experiment with script writing and work with audio files in order to produce the projects which are now presented. To achieve this they used the noTours application, created by the group Escoitar.org, which utilises open source (Android) mobile devices, equipped with GPS and a digital compass for editing a place with sounds and then reproduce these contents in binaural and ambisonic audio. In this way, pieces are created which allow you to explore spaces while experiencing an augmented acoustic reality, altering the perception of the space through the overlapping of one or more sound layers.

Escoitar.org is a collective of artists, researchers and engineers involved in analysing and working with sociological phenomena through sound landscaping. They started their joint enterprise with the construction of a sound file map of Galicia and then later went on to diversify their activities into other areas consistently in the intersections where performance, musicality and social matters meet through listening. At LABoral they presented noTours, 2009, a stroll around Cimadevilla, produced for the exhibition El pasado en el presente y lo propio en lo ajeno [The Past in the Present and the Foreign in the Self].

PROJECTS PRODUCED AT LABoral
All of the “sound walks” presented below have in common the redefinition of space through sound and the construction of stories in new landscapes. The public will be able to access the documentation in the lobby at LABoral and then embark on the proposed tours in the vicinity of the Art Centre.

DePoética espacial [Spatial DePoética]. Cristina Moreno García, Olalla Hernández, David Aguilar Sánchez
The project proposes to dislocate audio from an exhibition conceived for LABoral’s interior spaces, Experimental Station, and relocate it to the outside of the Art Centre with the intention of creating a poetic image on the partial and disorientated perception of a whole. With this experiment DePoética juxtaposes the intimacy connoted by enclosed space with the extroversion and unmanageability of open space.

LABerinto [LAByrinth]. Enrique Tomás
Developed as a test for the participants in the encounter, the project is a labyrinth of invisible walls. To find the exit and treasure (a sound poem), it is necessary to be guided solely by hearing in order to sense the limits of sound. Lacking visual references, the visitors find they need to walk very slowly while a voice guides them. LABerinto [LAByrinth] is therefore a real exercise in navigation by sound. A blind walk. A demonstration that sometimes the best way to find your way is by closing your eyes. www.ultranoise.es

159 Otro sonido posporno es posible [Another Post-porn Sound is Possible], Lilia Villafuerte; Alejandra Pérez; Isabel Espín; Helena Torres
The exploration of post-porn sound, something which has yet to be categorised, raises expectations of making possible a playful space for meaning creation. The main variables of this proposal are territory, sound and movement through space. By not having rigid narrative lines, the space appears defragmented and the passers-by form unique experiences.

Parking. Julie Faubert
A sound experiment that attempts to articulate the body’s movement, cars journeying and a sound ambience made up by real sounds (recorded in the actual car park outside LABoral) and fictional ones (which come from other spaces). The sound acts as a magical tool which allows you to move between the real, imaginary and fictitious spaces.

Les mots des animaux. Juego de comprensión transgeneracional [The Words of Animals. Transgenerational Game] Fred Adam and Verónica Perales
Les mots des animaux [The Words of Animals] is a simple game of sound association. It has been produced with the help of a 4-year-old girl (Kotodama) who has reproduced the sound of each animal and made a drawing for each one of them. The goal of the players is to guess which animal corresponds to each sound. In doing this they are helped by a file showing the drawings of the animals and a clue about the letters that form its name.

En tu ausencia [In Your Absence]. Lilia Villafuerte
En tu ausencia [In Your Absence] is a sound object, abandoned and invisible with a radius of 30 metres. Discovered during the week of research in the Spatial Narratives workshop at LABoral, this vestige of human presence is located exactly at the following coordinates: Latitude 43.525219 (N), Longtitud -5.611 (W). Like a poetic entity in itself, its structure is made up by layers of sounds. These represent small details cast by the presence of “someone”. All of the pieces build up a whole of “who” went through space leaving behind his or her traces.

Space Track. Luca Rullo
Space Track suggests a spatial tour, using public transport. To be precise, line 1 which goes to LABoral. It leaves from Gijón en route to LABoral in a space shuttle; land space is left behind, crossing over the boundaries of the space launch station and as it travels, spaces and close senses are transformed on the basis of sound.

noTours Cimadevilla (2011 version). Escoitar.org
This stroll around Cimadevilla was produced in 2009 for the El pasado en el presente y lo propio en lo ajeno [The Past in the Present and the Foreign in the Self] exhibition held at LABoral. Two and a half years later, the Escoitar.org group renovated its project, realized under the Mscape platform, and adapted it to noTours for Android telephones. The walk deals with the historical memory of a mythical inhabitant of Cimadevilla (Pepe Bajamar) whose songs narrate the changes his neighbourhood has undergone, its illustrious locals and its legends, intertwining this content with the sound landscape and the reality today.

Serendipia [Serendipity]. Helena Torres
A historical fiction story in the detective genre is the guiding thread of the walk which seeks to discover the temporal matter that makes up a physical space, and the relevance of sound in the perception of our surroundings, stimulating the involvement of the public with the physical context. This project has been developed over an artist residency at LABoral Centro de Arte and will be presented to the public throughout 2012.

AR Route (Ruta Anarquista) Anarchist Route and Tactical AR Tools. Mariano Maturana and Consol Rodríguez from Turismo Táctico, in collaboration with Sander Veenhof
Two augmented reality projects built by the Layar platform, with which the collective continues its TacticalTools series of interventions in the public space using AR technology for mobile devices.

http://www.turismotactico.org/marianomaturana/?p=154

La máquina de escribir de Google Maps [The Google Maps Typewriter]. Marc Antoni Malagarriga i Picas
A writing application using “geoglyphs”, the letters found in Google Maps views. The alphabets which are used are formed by live writing characters, sensitive to space/time.

http://tinyurl.com/geoglifs

http://www.tinyurl.com/artDbutxaca/

Re_colectors [Re_collectors]. Colectivo Y1m [the Y1m Collective] (Ester Barreto, Pedro Coelho, Pedro Dias and Enric Carreras)
Emerging figure in Barcelona’s public space. In the context of the crisis in which we find ourselves, the scrap metal collector is living in poverty-stricken and precarious conditions. The project consists in documenting the rounds they make all over the city, looking for scrap metal.
With the participation of: ACVic

http://mapes.hangar.org/ReColectors/

Mapa mudo [Mute Map]. Sandra García i Piñero with the collaboration of Roc Parés, Joan Llabata (Rez) and Lluís Gómez i Bigordà.
A reflection on silence, tranquility and serenity.
The mute map is an application for Android devices which makes it possible to add the silences and instantaneously make them available for viewing on the net.

http://www.sandragarciaphoto.com/mobile-app/mapamut

noTours has recently arrived Tallinn for starting the production of a new geolocalized soundwalk in the context of the exhibition Gateways (opening in May 2011 at KUMU).

We would like to link to the official website of the exhibition Gateways and copying some lines of the curatorial statement by Sabine Himmelsbach. Stay tuned.

http://www.goethe.de/ins/ee/prj/gtw/enindex.htm

The exhibition gateways. Art and Networked Culture presents artists whose work deals with the changed conditions of an interconnected world that increasingly is transmitted through media. The artistic works presented here use various means to tackle the theme of gateways that open to realms of action and experience in our digitally interconnected culture.

Mobility and connectivity are significant aspects and characteristics of our modern networked society; laptops and smart phones are the dominant accessories of the age of information. They offer constant and ubiquitous connection and access to a globalized digital network of data and information that overlays our reality like a second skin and that also influences our perception of the real objects surrounding us. Linked with GPS, RFID, GIS and other geographic information systems, mobile technologies enable us to temporally meld real space and virtual space. Data retrieval is accomplished directly on site and provides information on exact geographical location, products and much more. The Internet, too, has developed into one of the most important participatory media, next to the mobile phone. The catchphrase “Web 2.0” attempts to sum up the changes that have turned the Internet into a medium whose content increasingly is generated by users, and where people connect and exchange ideas in global online-communities. The name of the game is “participate!” And for years now, an ever-growing global online community has been busy uploading photographs and videos on online portals, announcing activities or expressing opinions through blogs or Twitter, or carrying on virtual financial transactions through online markets. Computer games, Second Life or online portals like Facebook or Myspace offer opportunities for global networking. The Internet culture, with its space- and community-building potential, is crucial to our society today.

The gateways exhibition presents works that deal with communication and networking, and that reflect a global Internet culture through the societal changes introduced by digital media. One aspect of the exhibition will comprise an examination of the reconfiguration of public space through the increasing overlap of the informational sphere and geographical space. Artists are pushing the envelope of locative media, testing their potential to provide gateways into spaces and communities and to identify alternative ways of networking beyond a largely consumer-oriented society. Mobile technologies are used in unexpected ways to render the invisible data network visible and tangible. These artistic interventions are not limited to data visualizations of a virtual space, but rather provide an opportunity to reveal suppressed knowledge – as a gateway to information.

Through the raising of various questions, a portrait emerges of how this increased networking influences our actions, our perceptions and our experiences of the world. The artistic confrontation with the significance of digitalization in society is not primarily about a reflection of technology per se, but rather about the consideration of its impact as a socio-economic phenomenon. Thus, along with the question about changing space and the increased layering of information, the question about the development of the self – which also exists through and within existing networks – comes to the fore. French philosopher Michel Serres says that new systems of communication lead to new ways of being human. How does a human being behave in a changed world where, the term “privacy” takes on a new meaning and where personal networks and digital links contribute fundamentally toward the individualized world in which we live? In a networked culture, information is not so much the product of discreet data processing units as it is the experience of networked relationships between them.

”Gateways” means access – access to spaces, to information, to data networks or communities. In computer science, a “gateway” is a switching apparatus for converting data, as an interface between various types of networks, digitally transcoding various media. The works shown in the exhibition thematize – in a manner analogous to the digital function of transmission – the transcoding or even translation of data and its evaluation in new contexts of meaning. The artistic positions on display use the opportunities of local and global networking to create access to information and to actively intervene in political and social developments. Media art in the 21st century thus does not limit itself to media forms, but rather reflects the importance of new technologies for societal and social change in a world increasingly influenced by media. The exhibition will present these concepts through a variety of artistic formats – from screen-based or Internet-based installations to interactive or sculptural environments, from the use of locative media to audio-guided walks, and more.

The gateways exhibition presents new forms of art and experimental works through which a young generation of artists in Europe – using a wide variety of media formats, including electronic networks and mobile technologies – encourages active public participation and conveys new experiences of perception. Thus the exhibition will extend beyond the KUMU Art Museum into the urban space of Tallinn, with interventionist happenings, audio-visual installations, walks or other formats.

gateways
Kunst und vernetzte Kultur / Art and Networked Culture
13 May to 25 September 2011

[Bera - Navarra - Spain]

noTours-adiBera at ERTZ Festival [September 10-18,2010]

http://www.ertza.net/eng_index.html

“To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new, or rather an old, order–not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust. The Chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker–not the Knight, but Walker, Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.”

Henry D. Thoreau, The Art of Walking, 1841.

Description

According to Michel de Certeau our cities are texts written by those who travel on their habitual itinearies. Keeping away from a pan-optic model of cities, usually visual, geometric and frontal and many times designed by urbanists, it appears a need for elaborating new sensible routes that could question our urban layouts as an univocal space. We need tools and attitudes for developing new ways of interference with our urban environment.

Escoitar.org, in collaboration with the projects  Soinumapa and Adibera, proposes a rediscovering of the streets of Bera, focusing on the value of sound as a proposition of knowledge to our societies. From a theoretical approach to the listening experience, this project aims to configure a new cartography condensed in the form of a sound walk.

For us, whe should become Adibera (Adi=attention, bera=sensible), keeping sensible to habitual knowledge and examinating our environment guided only by our human senses. Then, each one of us will be able to elaborate our own village, street, district: we will conquer all those habitual landscapes. We will fill them with personal details, establishing many personal marks and rediscovering those other invisible.

Far away from the propositon of a formal audioguide, we offer you building a collaborative map that could embrace all our memories, impressions, echoes, etc… of our territory.

noTours-adiBera is a project in collaboration by noTours [Escoitar.org] and adiBera [Festival Ertz].

Hardware/Web noTours: Chiu Longina

Software: Enrique Tomás, Berio Molina y Horacio González

Concept, documentation: Juan-Gil López

Technical Assistant Bera > Xavier Balderas

Contents Bera> Adibera & Soinumapa: Jakoba Errekondo, Alex Mendizabal, Juan José Aranguren, Xabier Erkizia, Iñigo Telletxea, Asier Gogortza

Special Thanks to everybody helping us in Bera!

Some Press Links: Diario Vasco and more at Diario Vasco