Crowded public places can at times be devoid of character. Indistinctive cityscapes, people talking to their cell-phones, listening to music, the ebb and tide of traffic leave behind blurred rather than clear impressions of a place. Increasing our immersion in our surroundings by engaging multiple senses is an interesting notion in itself though the benefits (if any) are largely suspect.
We no longer remain a nameless, faceless anonymity in the milling crowds when we participate in voluntary surveillance like the loca project. The city does not remain without character when we allow it to create music based on our interactions with it.
"a system that creates electronic music based on sensing bodily and environmental factors. Mapping these to the real-time processing of concrete sounds, Sonic City generates a personal soundscape co-produced by physical movement, local activity, and urban ambiance. Encounters, events, architecture, (mis)behaviours - all become means of interacting with or 'playing the city' "
We could potentially play back the sounds of the "City and I" into an eidophone to render that experience two dimensional.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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