Date/Time
Date(s) - 31/08/2019
10:00 am - 1:00 pm

Location
British Library courtyard

Recording and listening in between sounds and silences. A Sound Walk Sunday walkshop in and around the British Library.

With Geert Vermeire and Andrew Stuck, Sound Walk Sunday co-producers.

Libraries are quiet spaces, but also produce a great deal of ambient sound, inviting to make unusual and attractive recordings.

The soundscape Library Sounds | Study Ambiance has over 2,2 million views on YouTube. A similar recording on YouTube, Library Background Noise for Relaxation  
has over 570,000 views.

A library is a place of a silence nevertheless, a space of people, desperately trying not to make noise,  as close as one can get to a no man’s land between sound and quietness. In a walkshop in and around The British Library we will explore and make recordings, searching (maybe desperately) for silences around the library and sounds inside of the library.

This walkshop is organized in the frame of Ecumenopolis, a sound walk project developed for Sound Walk Sunday 2019, globally searching – in and around libraries of large cities-  for similar and different sounds of these cities and their libraries. For Sound Walk Sunday, we organize walks and make recordings  -together with local sound artists-  in / around the City Library of Sao Paulo, the State Library of Moscow, the National Library of Athens and The British Library in London.

The recorded sounds of each city are mapped and placed on locations of another city with the collaborative software platform CGeomap, allowing to walk with your mobile device and headphones inside and around your library and hearing simultaneously the silences and ambiances of another place.

Ecumenopolis (from Greek: οἰκουμένη oecumene, meaning “world”, and πόλις polis “city”, thus “a city made of the whole world”; pl. ecumenopolises or ecumenopoleis) is the hypothetical concept of a planetwide city. The word was invented in 1967 by the Greek city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to represent the idea that in the future urban areas and megalopolises would eventually fuse and there would be a single continuous worldwide city as a progression from the current urbanization, population growth, transport and human networks.

During the walkshop, starting at The British Library, participants will be taken on a drift, looking for and recording what is not there, and make own recordings inside of the British Library and around the area.

The walkshop goes along with a soundwalk for mobile devices allowing to listen to the sounds of and around the City Library of Sao Paulo and the State Library of Moscow, while walking in and around The British Library, available on https://cgeomap.eu/going/.

Workshop results will become part of a larger art project in Moscow, Athens and in Sao Paulo.

Meet in the courtyard of British Library / outside the entrance to the Knowledge Centre at 10 am – 31 August 2019

Artists and creatives with a minimal background in sound recording/editing are encouraged to participate, although the workshop is open for all interested.

Registration is obligatory – please do not try to ‘drop-in’ on the day.

Duration: 3 hours

What you should bring: As well as weather-specific clothes and shoes, bring something to record with – either your smartphone, tablet or a sound recorder (recommended). If you have a lapel microphone we recommend you bring that too (they are inexpensive and make for much better sound quality). Mobile device with data connection needed for the complementary sound walk.

Artists involved: in Moscow and Sao Paulo: Ekaterina Trubina, Lisa Sazonova, Maria Molokova -State Conservatory Moscow, Fabiana Quintana, Henrique Souza Lima, Yonara Dantas, Migue Antar,  NuSom – University Sao Paulo. Lead by Geert Vermeire. Created with CGeomap.

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