Audio walking

Since I am currently sans camera, which puts a damper on my excursions (snapping photos is half the fun), here is something to satisfy the other senses. I have recently developed an obsession with audio walks, or sound walks, in NYC. Not  exactly audio tours--though they may act in a tour-like manner-- the walks to which I refer encapsulate the essence and many layers of the city through sounds and narrative. If you're up for a little time travel and reflection in the upcoming fall weather, I would definitely recommend doing one...or several.

I have gone on two so far, the first a work by artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller entitled "Her Long Black Hair" (2004).The experience starts at the southern gates of Central Park and takes the walker within, following the footsteps of a nameless blackhaired woman via several photographs taken at various points in the park. While walking (alongside Cardiff's audible footsteps), it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the sounds occurring in "your" park and that of Cardiff's world. Throughout the meandering is a stream of consciousness flow from Cardiff, the recitation of Baudelaire, music, slave narratives--an artistic represenation of this particular space and the art of walking itself.

You can read more about this walk and Cardiff's and Miller's other walking projects all over of the world, here.

The second walk, purchased off of Soundwalks.com, is slightly less abstract but still an in depth exploration of the walking space, in this case Ground Zero, narrated by  NYC author Paul Auster. The trek starts on Broadway at Saint Paul's Chapel between Fulton and Vesey where upon entering the cemetery you are instructed to sit on a bench, staring straight out to the fenced off construction site which once was the Twin Towers. Auster then takes you down Church Street, through Ground Zero, World Financial Centers 1, 2, 3 and the Winter Garden, and ends on a bench, waterside, looking out onto the Hudson. This is a beautiful, and of course heart-heavy experience due to the history of the space, spanning the time when this area was the hub of broadcasting and electronics, to architectural perspectives on building the Towers, followed by a conglomeration of news castings and personal recordings centered around their collapse on September 11, 2001. Also part of this audio portrait are the sounds and  "soul" of the buildings themselves, with the testament of artists, including the incredible perspectives of  Phillipe Petit (Man on Wire).

I would highly recommend this walk, along with checking out the website and the various others Soundwalks has to offer--Bronx Hip-Hop, Brooklyn's Dumbo district as well as a men and women's Hasidic walk, Chinatown, Little Italy--all seem to be full of character and narrated by quirky, and sometimes well-known, guides.  There are also walks for various cities in China and Paris.

I plan on doing all of them (even, with luck, eventually those in Paris and China), and also finding more audio-art walk sources, and will of course post on each experience.

So far, the effects of these walks have been disorienting; while they in one sense immerse you in the environment, their constant reflection on the history, emotion, and abstract concepts related to that space simutaneously puts you on a different plane. Shall I say, possibly, somewhere in the urban twlight zone, in between those many layers of New York.

Maybe that is the most pure city experience one can have.

Happy audio walking!