Tour.png)
A Knocking Bird
An urban Sound walk
[ An amplified Gesture ]
Knocking bird is an urban and e-culture project with an ecological engagement, organized by Cultuurcentrum Sint-Niklaas, WIT Urban Team (www.wit-urban.team) and noTours (www.notours.org) in collaboration with the Colour U, several international sound artists and environmental and ecological organizations. Curator: Geert Vermeire.
The pilot of this project happened between March and September 2013 and invited the residents and visitors of the city to a new urban experience with participation and with locative media.
Points of departure were a series of creative meetings with residents and artistic urban interventions by WIT Urban Team, next to an European event with fifteen residents from different European cities to explore nature in the city of Sint-Niklaas during a residency of a week. Their visit was been transformed in artistic results and in personal contributions about nature and city.
.
Project 'Luistervinken'/ 'a knocking bird' explore the city of Sint-Niklaas with your ears. This project wants to experiment with social media, participation, sustainability and City experience. This project explains the link between art, nature and memory of the city. The artists of WIT Urban Team went in search of nature in the city. The artists listened to stories and experiences of the older residents. They examine the relationship between man and nature in the city. The findings are converted into sound bites and the GPS based system of noTours pins the sounds on places in the city. The result is a geolocated sound walk through the city. This allows visitors to explore the city and hear behind the facades in search of hidden nature, to the singing of birds, to the voices of the past. Do you want to experience and discover Sint-Niklaas in an alternative way? The sound walk is open to the public from June 15th to September 15th 2013. The audio guides are available at the Tourist Office or you can download an app on your smartphone. Knocking bird, writing project on the net.
[noTours, augmented aurality ] making sense of places
noTours is an open source and freeware project by Escoitar.org and the Milena priniple that allows editing a place with sounds. This means that you can attach sounds to a territory and that later, when you go physically to that place you can listen to them. The trick is using our noTours Android Application that detects your location (via GPS) and plays your audios exactly in the place where you decided. Our project makes it possible to listen to and to walk in spaces, experiencing an augmented acoustic reality. This alters the perception of space by superimposing new layers sounds to a territory, allowing the creation of parallel realities and connecting the real space with the collective memory of its inhabitants. noTours proposes a sound-walk through a defined territory, a historical and acoustical journey narrated by protagonists of the territory. noTours incorporate to this journey sound elements relative to the area where the visitant is located as well as sound art works or other sound elements in relation with the concrete space where the walker is.
Departing from workshops with residents and using collaborative creation processes this project aims to turn the process that allows some social expressions to be considered cultural heritage upside down, by offering society a tool to participate in the process. Inspired by the situationist ´dérive’ and evading from the city-panorama model, usually thought as an eminent visual, pan-optic and geometric model, delineated by urbanists and cartographers, it appears for us the necessity of elaborating new sensible itineraries that could question the urban lay out, usually considered as an univocal space. Using the extended format of touristic audio guides, understanding them as devices giving us information about spaces cataloged as relevant or for the public interest, this project would like to question their real value as well as the official discourses that contain. Our objective is the deconstruction of this old-framed format for designing a new one opened to the collective memory of the inhabitants and connected to the real time situation of the city involved. Between fiction and reality, our focus is the intervention on strange or familiar territories and converting them into mutant spaces. Touring them under the effects sound will reveal us a hidden city filled with personal stories and interferences.
Via participation of the residents and contributions of the European visitors the project will focus on an aural experience of the city and on the creation of a soundwalk with an alternative and creative tour of the city.
The soundscapes are loaded into an audioguide with gps and activated when you approach certain locations. Once you switch on the audioguide you only need to walk. You are surrounded by soundscapes which come and go according to your movement through the city.
A project by the Cultuurcentrum City Sint-Niklaas with support of Grundtvig, Lifelong Learning Programme, Education and Culture, European Union.
More information and full programme : Information : patricia.maes@sint-niklaas.be 00323 778 33 70 in partnership with Geert Vermeire, the Milena Principle and WIT Urban Team
geert.vermeire@themilena.com
0032483 121 133
www.themilena.com
http://www.dromenvandenatuurindestad.be/
https://www.facebook.com/dromenvandenatuur#!/theknockingbird
[ Map for the A Knocking Bird soundwalk in Sint-Niklaas Belgium ]
The noTours project in Sint-Niklaas was nominated by the EU as one of the finalists for the European Prize for Tourism and the Environment, rewarding original touristical initiatives bringing together the city and ecology (with the European meeting, alternative city walks in Sint-Niklaas by WIT urban team and a noTours-walk).
