Narrating the City in Augmented Aur(e)ality
Quoi:
Talk
Quand:
8:30 AM, mardi 14 août 2018
(1 heure 15 minutes)
Où:
Pavillon J.-A. DeSève (DS) UQAM -
DS-1520
Comment:
Discussion:
0
The idea of walking as the practice of narrating the city constitutes
the recurrent theme of Michel de Certau’s “The Practice of Everyday
Life:” the pedestrian activity is repeatedly compared to or described as
“enunciation,” “enunciatory operations,” “statements” and “stories”.
According to the French sociologist, “[t]he act of walking is to the
urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements
uttered” (de Certeau 1988: 97). The story of spatial practices “begins
on ground level, with footsteps” (de Certeau 1988: 97) and “the art of
>>turning<< phrases finds an equivalent in an art of
composing a path (tourner un parcours)” (de Certeau 1988: 100). It might
well be said that walking in the city represents not only the very
prototype of ergodic literature (Aarseth 1997) but also predates the
notion of augmented reality in its technological sense. One of the
practices which directly address narrative potential of moving across
space is soundwalking: theorized both as the classic method of acoustic
ecology (Westerkamp 1974, 2002) and its current re-examinations
(Paquette & McCartney 2012, McCartney 2012). In my paper I would
like to analyze the practice of soundwalking as narrating the city in
“the augmented aur(e)ality” (Noll 2017), yet shifting the focus to its
mobile media, touch screen-based version. My case study will be Udo
Noll’s radio aporee platform and its most recent incarnation: miniatures
for mobiles (a platform for sound-based, locative and spatial
micro-narratives, including the phone app). Therefore, the practice of
narrating the city through walking will be analyzed from the double
perspective: as augmented aur(e)ality and as the embodied experience
played out on two levels simultaneously (as physically moving the body
through space and as interacting with touch screens of mobile media).