Filed under: walkable
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
Just arrived for production and rehearsal lead up to In Lieu‘s season in the OzAsia Festival. Bad $4 coffee from the Festival Centre café (isn’t there a $3-something ceiling?) but set construction is all well in hand, likely to be delivered early. Looked at Richard Serra’s amazing steel sculptures and torqued walls for early inspiration (although it is not a steel set)… more soon.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
How interesting to open the Herald this morning to see (coincidentally I’m sure) two major, scape-changing, high-profile Sydney building developments unveiled on the same day. And what different projects! One, the much maligned Barangaroo site, sees a congregation of generic office towers crowding down towards the harbour edge and looming ominously over the (quaint, diminutive, neighbourly) Rocks to the North. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-development, or even anti-high density. I strongly believe it makes environmental sense to densify pockets of human habitation and we should be doing so with some urgency. Plus I find suburban sprawl creepy.
The other project is Frank Gehry’s new building for UTS’s business school on a back lot in Chinatown, a soft pile of boxes that you can imagine melting under the summer sun, and/or stoically turning its wrinkled face towards a grey winter rain. The building has taken a punch in the guts, already knocked about by life, sunk slightly in on itself but wiser for it. Its rear facade is completely different, a patchwork of glassy shards in the midst of being disassembled or assembled. Both sides are Gehry-like undulating shapes, but put against the rendering of Barangaroo, the projects’ difference in human-ness is striking. I mean, the Gehry building dances, it moves, it reflects and participates in what it means to daily traverse the city. It will age gracefully.
The Barangaroo Action Group is launching legal proceedings against the state’s approval of the plans, so who knows what will go ahead in the end. But here’s what I’m thinking about: the performativity of our buildings and social spaces more generally. Place-making as Paul Carter calls it. What it means to live with, in, and amongst them. History and futures. Life between buildings as Jan Gehl emphasises. Here’s a big clue: the Barangaroo rendering is made from the POV of some airborne machine, a private helicopter perhaps hovering somewhere over Balmain. Who is going to experience the site in this way? If you teleport down in amongst the towers, I imagine it will feel much like many other disastrous Sydney streets. Deserted, dead, a discarded plastic bag flying in circles, caught in a windy cesspool between buildings. Ahhh Sydney.
Here’s another funny comparison. They haven’t made any transportation plan for how the 30k people working at Barangaroo will get there (scrapped light rail extension; scrapped metro). So the government is spending $286million to build a pedestrian walkway to the nearest train station. The Gehry building, as a postscript, will cost $150million.
image by Gehry Partners
Moss wall (1994)
Passage: from tunnels of light I turn into dark, swapping fractured fractals and the dry sniff of the arctic for a slumbering under-earth kiln…
I’m hoping to win a trip to Copenhagen with this description of my experience of Olafur Eliasson‘s installations currently on at the MCA in Sydney. The competition asks you to devote just 25 words to one work, but how to choose? To me, this truly fantabulous exhibition is so much about the transition of encounter and experience, moving from one work to another. This section of the exhibition particularly, the rooms taking you from the overwhelmingly giant wall of reindeer moss and spiky steel bubble of a kaleidoscope, through a low dark tunnel lined with fired soil bricks smelling just slightly moist, hinting at the mistiness to come in the room beyond… ahhh, so satisfying a journey. I would guess that passageway, the installation ‘Soil quasi bricks,’ goes quite unnoticed for many, in comparison to the showstoppers on either side of it. But really, they’re all passageways, getting you to and from experiences of colour, light, reflection, refraction.
There’s so much more I could write. Go now, before it ends on the 11th of April.
Beauty (1993)
A friend put me onto some little page-turning videos on youtube from Moleskine’s Detour project, a touring exhibition of illustrated notebooks (more info). Ahhh – paper, pen, pencil… the simple things. Love this one by French artist Marianne Fountain which is like a flip-book animation, wrapping cartographic views of the city and the evolution of single-cell organisms into a cyclic story.
Have a look at Kacie Kinzer’s Tweenbots here. She says, “Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.”
I love the low-tech aesthetics of Kacie’s robots – as only minimally anthropomorphised performing objects (head blob, body blob, smiley face) they nonetheless manage to mirror very complex human experiences of vulnarability but also social connection in the urban environment. It reminds me of urbanist Jane Jacobs’ observations of the social life of city sidewalks in her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “They bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion” (55). And yet, there is “an almost unconscious assumption of general street support when the chips are down… a web of public respect and trust” (56). The ability to engage in an intimate social interaction (I’ll help you) without this implying private committment (I can still be anonymous) is, Jane argues, a hallmark of city streets and the density of the urban environment.
Kacie is a postgraduate student in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program in Tisch School of the Arts. They do such fun stuff in this program! Have a look here.
Have a look at this great article by Tom Vanderbilt for Design Observer on the Montréal Metro and the music within the machine… Tom is led to thoughts on early electronic music and the coincidences of design, but I’m really interested in the oddly banal/intriguing experiences of transportation and transiting in the everyday. I have recently been reading Marc Augé’s Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthology of Supermodernity, in which transit spaces are one of his major objects:
A world where people are born in the clinic and die in hospital, where transit points and temporary abodes are proliferating under luxurious or inhuman conditions (hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity); where a dense network of means of transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce; a world thus surrendered to solitary individuality, to the fleeting, the temporary and ephemeral, offers the anthropologist (and others) a new object, whose unprecedented dimensions might usefully be measured before we start wondering what sort of gaze it may be amenable. (78)
The City of Sydney is hosting an upcoming talk as part of their 2030 Sustainable Sydney vision.
Connecting Cities
London-Sydney-Mumbai
Ideas & inspiration for sustainable cities
with Adam Spencer, Clover Moore, Nicky Gavron (London) and Dr Shubha Raul (Mumbai)
Thursday 23 Oct
6.30-8pm
State Theatre, 49 Market St Sydney
Free but you need to get tickets through Ticketmaster 136 100
Filed under: walkable
Duncan Speakman (an audio walker from Bristol in the UK) was in residence at the Performance Space in Sydney in August/September making a walk of Redfern. Performance Space is bringing back the audio walk for a second season in its Spring Block so go and walk the walk (as they say)!
You can pick up a headset from the lobby of Carriageworks:
Sat 25 Oct – Sat 29 Nov
Wed-Sat 12-6PM
FREE – see the Performance Space website for more info
The blurb goes: Boundary Songs is a series of micro-sound walks in the Redfern area. These mixtures of music, sound design and spoken word are recreations of moments in the lives of local residents. The stories on each walk interlink, like a series of short films with no screens, where the world around you becomes a cinema.
I walked Boundary Songs on a very wet and windy day a few weeks ago – it was a handful, keeping track of umbrella, map, mp3 player… But there is nothing like the live mix of the soundtrack and the patter of water pinging overhead, to remind you that this is a live experience. It is only partly the recording, and partly its congruences and interactions with you and your walk in the world.
I think that Boundary Songs is a slightly different kind of audio walk for Duncan, and different from ones I have gone on before: it wasn’t a continuous walk, embedded in a land- or city-scape; a combination of touristic guide, instructions on where to go or what to look at, and fictional or semi-fictional storytelling. Boundary Songs is a collection of several short walks that interconnect in some sense, but you finish one, return to the normal world, and walk to the next: you can do them in any order. I would call them soundscapes for walking. The storytelling is backgrounded, at times a submerging part of the soundscape which is composed from sounds sampled on site. The recordings serve more to create an atmosphere, an emotional or sensory framework, from which to view the chosen streets of Redfern.
The walks also highlight what a contested, complicated and misunderstood site Redfern is – their disjointedness is perhaps an inevitable result of Duncan Speakman’s very outsider position. What observations or connections can an Englishman make in a few weeks’ artist residency? But they also provoked me to want to know more of the histories piled high beneath the bitumen and renewed gentrification of the suburb, and behind the symbol that ‘Redfern’ has become across Australia.
If you have never gone on an audio walk before, or if you have, or if you are really into ambient sound… or if you are interested in notions of place, or if you want to experience how just the act of listening can make you see, taste and touch the world differently, go check out Boundary Songs.
For more about Duncan Speakman, go to his website.
