Ruminations While (Audio)Walking: Time, Place, and the Body

One: Begin. April 2005

“Isn’t it fabulous?” Roger Moore croons in my ear, as I admire the painted ceilings of the Gate of Supreme Harmony. Previously I had always shunned the audio tour desk when visiting museums and galleries, content to find my own way through the space and its objects. But I had heard that Roger had been contracted to do the English version of the Forbidden City’s tour, and that it was itself pretty fabulous (in a kitschy kind of a way).

I jostle with the crowds peering through narrow doors into dark, faded, and dusty rooms. I marvel at the piles of new golden roof tiles everywhere, part of the Olympic makeover happening everywhere in Beijing. Every once in a while I stop, have a moment with Roger as he directs my attention to a detail of the architecture, tells me stories and gives me dates. This is after all, a simple extension of traditional museum practice where looking is primary; a slight elaboration on the informative label.

But it is not all just looking; it is also a mobile and auditory tour very connected to being in this place. I am standing at the top of a terrace behind the Hall of Protective Harmony, surveying the kingdom below me. The characters of the audio narrative – ghosts of construction workers who pulled great slabs of stone across icy roads in 1406 – and the imposing scale of the Imperial Palace combine to collapse time and history. It is easy to imagine that my body in this place is that of the Emperor – Pu Yi maybe – that it is my kingdom. It is a small hint at the possibilities for transportation and transformation contained within the narrated soundscape in my ears.

MP3 technology and the advent of podcasting has led to a proliferation of portable players in many people’s daily lives and an accompanying development of on-the-go listening practices. The sounds of the real world around us and the recorded sounds from our headphones mix together as we move through place. There is greater possibility here to mess with what we hear and where we are, in either time or place. There is room for unofficial narratives[i] as well as scripted soundtracks such as Roger Moore's, or for ephemeral Hollywood moments when music and scene are just right. There is room for flights of fancy or of foreboding, for the personal or intimate occurring in the spaces of the very public. Real and imagined, heard and not-heard, seen and not-seen combine to create connections between place, time, and body; and both exploit and expose these connections at the core of lived experience.

In the following pages, I will go on a meandering walk through several art works, tourist productions, and everyday locomotions that together try to articulate a temporal-spatial-corporeal nexus made evident through the practice of audio walking. Taking Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks’ theatre/archaeology as a model, this paper is multi-vocal; attempting reconstruction as a “creative process in the present” (Pearson & Thomas 133). It draws together my nearly four years of history engaging with audio walks of some kind or another, including a walk I have made and several walks I have taken. Through its wandering path, this paper remaps selective experiments and analyses I have undertaken over that period, drawing meaning from some walks stumbled upon by accident, their significance only gleaned in retrospect, and others that were sought out as my interest in the performance genre deepened. The Forbidden City English audio tour is a materially different endeavour than those to come: it wasn't so much an audio walk as a stop-and-listen audio guide. However, I opened this paper with my recollections of this experience because it was my introduction (in retrospect) to the sort of time-travelling, shape-shifting virtual world that sound can tap into. Not just sound alone, but sound combined with being of place, of body.

Place. The body. Time. All three are required for engagement with an audio walking tour of this kind. They are the raw materials that prove flexible and malleable; a messy interrelatedness and occasional congruence occurring between them. “I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them… the synthesis of both time and space is a task that always has to be performed afresh” (Merleau-Ponty 161-2). I contend that with examination the practice of audio walking reveals the workings of this synthesis – both cracking open and performing the relationship between space, place and people – and thereby tapping into the qualities and processes of lived experience in thoughtful ways.

In 1977, Yi-Fu Tuan wrote, “Human beings require both space and place. Human lives are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom" (54), in dialogue with the very large body of discourse on the topic of space and place within cultural geography, cultural anthropology and philosophy. For Tuan, as for phenomenologists before him, body was “lived body” and space was “humanly construed space” (34-35). Space is associated with openness, action and the future, and place with the particularities of locality and object, centres of felt value (54, 138). Edward Casey furthers this argument:

Minimally, places gather things in their midst – where ‘things’ connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts. Think only of what it means to go back to a place you know, finding it full of memories and expectation, old things and new things, the familiar and the strange, and much more besides. (“How to Get from Space to Place” 24)

It is this idea of place as saturated with events and perceptions, emotions and associations that is exploited by the audio walk. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair, a 45-minute audio walking tour of New York’s Central Park,[ii] is exemplary of this point. It incorporates retellings of Cardiff’s nightmares and memories, observations of people you are passing, instructions of where to go or what to do, and general philosophical musings. Stories are coloured by background music and other atmospheric sounds, recorded binaurally – a technique which uses two small microphones positioned on either side of a head to capture the intricate manoeuvres of soundwaves wrapping around the head before reaching the ears. This results in hearing the way ears hear, when the recording is played back through headphones; that is, spatially located (and place-invoking) sound.

All this, though, is fused to being in and listening to the live sounds of the real-world environment you are guided through, revealing place as a layered, historically soaked thing constituting and constituted by our memories and imaginings. Mirjam Schaub writes (in connection with de Certeau), “A space familiar to us from our everyday excursions and walks ‘shapes itself’ around us. It acquires a personal and emotional geography that functions as an affective framework for memories and expectations to take on quasi-spatial qualities” (94). The affective and multi-temporal inner spaces of the walker laminate to the external spaces of the environment around them.

Her Long Black Hair shows that experience lives on in memory and place to be reactivated and refashioned endlessly, "performed afresh" in Merleau-Ponty's terminology, and that time can be stretched and flattened, expanded and contracted through the diachronic layers of place.

The past reaches forward and we are transported back.

 

Two: Walk With Me. August 2005

We are sitting on a bench. A motley crew of workday lunchers, people watchers, readers, and phone talkers brought together by a casual commonality. There are a few among us from our performance class, sitting in a row, mirroring the line of pedicab drivers opposite – a jovial group.

We line up at the Public Art Fund’s lime green cart. I trade my never-used driver’s license (always the pedestrian these days) for headset, map and a packet of photographs. I return to my seat on the bench. Try to resist the urge to peek at my photographs, and look anyway. I fit the headphones around my ears. Press play. Discover that sitting here on this bench at Sixth Avenue and Central Park South is where this walking tour begins.

An assault of sounds from all directions augment those of the city beyond my headphones. Sirens wail, heading west along 59th Street. Applause from an unseen audience. A lively marching band strikes up behind me, somewhere down by the pond, and then fades away. I know that Her Long Black Hair utilises binaural recording. I laugh at Cardiff’s cleverness, aware of the technology. But still can’t help turning around to check what is (not) really there. A taste of what is to come: events from the near and far past combine with those made in the moment. Sounds from all directions – spatially, temporally – dis/orientate us to the rules of our new environment. We are going places. (Even here on the bench.)

Cardiff tells me to stand, to begin walking. “Walk to the sound of my footsteps,” she says. I do. Her stride is comfortable. (Listen clip 1.)

 

 

 

With Cardiff’s calm, seductive voice in my ear and her feet stepping along with my feet, I am invited to see and experience the city of New York, specifically its Central Park, differently.

There is a sense of secret or guilty delight – I am doing things outside of expected normal urban behaviour: I lick my finger and touch it to my cheek; I stop in the middle of this busy footpath, turn, and begin to walk backwards; I walk with eyes closed (something I would not normally do alone in the city but which seems okay since Janet is with me). There is a heightened sense of myself both as part of, and apart from, the world around me; I wonder if I look odd, or perhaps I am invisible to others. I vacillate, undecided, between the two.

I am coming to the end of this path. “Turn left,” Cardiff guides me, just in time. She points out the ice cream seller up ahead – yes, I see him – and then conjures peanut sellers, tightrope walkers. I hear the shooting of scavengers, pigs who were supposed to eat the rubbish in the streets but who preferred the fertile grounds of the park. “This very moment there is an organ-grinder down in the street playing and singing – it is wonderful, it is the accidental and insignificant things in life which are significant,” Kierkegaard’s words from 1841 (Cardiff).

Her Long Black Hair draws attention to the sensory, the spatial, the temporal and the historical. Scale comes into play as I walk along a path with trees as old as the Civil War – suddenly I am very small along this timeline that Cardiff makes elastic; stretching it to encompass the long ago and the more recent past when she walked this walk, the now of me. My feet are awash in the creek that this path used to be, and I am reminded of the giant earth art project that is Olmstead’s Central Park. I walk in step with others: with Baudelaire on the streets of Paris and Harry Thomas in the frantic rustle of a dead-of-night escape.

The world is different at the scale of the pedestrian. There is access to people, sights, smells, spaces – a whole range of bodily experiences that come about through being dropped in the world, of experiencing the world through de Certeau’s “passing by” (97). Compare this with Robert Moses’ ironically named “living model” of the city out at Flushing Meadows – a panoptically viewed pale plaster cast devoid of “people and everything that comes with them: interaction, spontaneity, danger, dirt…”(Momchedjikova, 269). In New York, as with many cities, being the pedestrian is most often an experience of being small in comparison to the surrounding architecture, to the size of the city itself, to its mass of commerce, production, and crowds. A walking tour is a map on a pedestrian scale – where the geometric network of the grid gives way to an impression of the streets by way of one’s passage through them. Details of history, gossip, and daily drama are of import; the map is peopled with stories. In Luc Sante’s Low Life (1991), a cultural history of 19^th century New York’s underbelly, his cast of characters – the drifters, the homeless, the underclass, the thieves, the orphans and more – must rely on this extreme disparity of scale for their very existence. You need dark alleys and corners shadowed by the towers of the city in order to be ignored or forgotten, or to hide, to skulk, to be up to no good.

 

 

 

Eurydice died from the bite of a snake, Cardiff reminds me. And with a jolt I remember the teenaged boy standing opposite me on the subway just an hour or so earlier: his pet snake coiling its thick body around his hand, wrist, and forearm; the biting end nestled adoringly in the boy’s curved palm. One of those uncanny coincidences again, I suppose. I circle back to Kierkegaard: “it is the accidental and insignificant things…”

A bite of Eurydice. A bite of an apple. Snakes everywhere it seems, and so too, great falls: Eurydice falls to the underworld and Eve falls from grace, and I too in my act of walking fall again and again, the predicament of the biped, balanced so precariously in this upward stance. Rebecca Solnit writes, “The animal kingdom has nothing else like this column of flesh and bone always in danger of toppling, this proud unsteady tower… Children begin to walk to chase desires no one will fulfil for them: the desire for that which is out of reach, for freedom, for independence from the secure confines of the maternal Eden. And so walking begins as delayed falling, and the fall meets with the Fall.” (32-33)

Was Eurydice walking in a garden when the snake sent her falling towards Hades?

Why is it that this walk, with only one foot in the real and one in the virtual, reminds me so really, bodily of me? The answer is in the wet saliva on my cheek, in the bead of sweat forming high on my forehead where the day’s hot sun meets my hairline. It is in the actual walk, the muscles of my legs that flex and contract, the speed of my moving bringing a slight breeze to my wet skin. Walking is that thing that links the body to space, through time. It is choreography at three miles per hour.

And what of walking in Cardiff’s world, the world of Her Long Black Hair? “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence…” (de Certeau 108).

Walking in Cardiff’s world is a way to access the “deep layers we only see in our dreams” (Cardiff); to confront our own memories and the memories of place that history holds for us, imagined memories perhaps, of death and dismemberment, homelessness and disappearance and regret – dark memories. Her Long Black Hair is a meditation on time, remembrance, and presence as well as on walking; reminding us of the body’s place within the layers of the city. “Walking is very calming, one step after another one – one foot moving into the future and one in the past, our bodies caught in the middle” (ibid).

 

When I first walked Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair in Central Park, I was overwhelmed by my feeling of heightened sensory experience, of the external world made technicolour.[iii] However, the walk also highlighted my participation in the construction of the experience; it highlighted my body in its biological or anatomical, as well as culturally and socially scripted, incarnations. The circumstance of walking in a place that was familiar and also unfamiliar (she drew my attention to things I had never noticed before, including things deep below ground and only “see”-able in the mind’s eye or ear), gave me an intense sensation of being-in-the-world.

According to Edward Casey, the immediate surrounding environment of the lived body is “an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural” (“Between Geography” 683). Self, the “geographical subject,” is linked to places through the body.

… lived bodies belong to places and help to constitute them. Even if such bodies may be displaced in certain respects, they are never placeless; they are never only at discrete positions in world time or space, though they may also be at such positions. By the same token, however, places belong to lived bodies and depend on them… Bodies and places are connatural terms. They interanimate each other (“How to Get from Space to Place” 24, emphasis in original).

Feeling one’s own physicality and materiality – the presence of the self and/in the surrounding environment – is very important to audio walks such as Cardiff’s. Tim Edensor writes, “the body is the means then by which we experience and feel the world; the senses act to inform presence and engagement to constitute a ‘being-in-the-world’… the senses both experience and structure space” (100).

The use of a binaural soundtrack confuses your perceptual abilities and you must rely on more than just your hearing – a whole body of senses must be employed. Her Long Black Hair compels you to see through what you hear, to feel what you see, to rely on proprioception and kinesthetics. There is no clear hierarchy. Rather, the concepts of the sensorium, a “complex manifold of simultaneous impressions” (Pearson & Shanks 54), and synesthesia are key.

The tricks Cardiff plays on your hearing, while disrupting your assurance that what you hear is really there, cause you to realign your sense of balance. Her phantom footsteps, once aligned to mine, actually assure me of my physical presence. The snipping shears dangerously close to my collar cause me to touch the back of my neck. I see and smell things with double the potency as Janet describes them to me. I am hyper-attuned to the temperature of the air surrounding me, as well as the moments when I fall out of step. I experience visceral, intersubjective déjà vu when Janet says, “There’s a man on the bench reading the paper” (Cardiff), and there really is a man on the bench reading the paper.

In his book Site-Specific Art, Nick Kaye talks of Meredith Monk’s 1969 piece Juice, observing how “one space and site acts as the map and memory of another” (122). He quotes Monk:

I started thinking about the idea of residue. Something left behind or coming after a process has ended… The past and present in one piece. A map. A map is always used as a guide, a reference before (sometimes during) travel. In this piece, the map would be a continuous process (during the piece) and a residue of the process of the entire piece (in Kaye 120, emphasis in original).

Monk’s map, a guide for what is to come as well as residue or trace of what has previously happened, is a good explanation for the uncanny way in which time and space often intersect one another in Cardiff's audio walks. Moments of felt synchronicity – “aha” moments – where instructions or observations amazingly come true. They remind the walker of Janet’s previous, aurally mapped walk in this same place, synchronising past and future (the place of the past and the place of the future) in one vertiginous move.

 

Three: Mapping Place & Time. May 2006

The audio walk plots a specific route through a specific place; the listener negotiates the geographical, architectural and temporal spaces of the real and remembered worlds. In an effort to further understand the role that place, site, and location plays in an audio walk I took research to practice, making an audio walk of my own called A Place Called Lost by utilising what I had learned from Cardiff.

This is an audio walk. These walks always tend to be tied to place, a rumination on or exposition of place. But I started wondering what if they weren’t? What if it was about placelessness, an any place or no place.

A narrow gap left between two buildings just wide enough for a small child.

A crack, an interstice, a place lost between two others.

A waiting room. (Shih Pearson)

I wanted to question the role of place in the audio walk, cheekily setting out to make a walk based on placelessness. I took walkers to passageways and basement stairs – anywhere, nowhere, in-between spaces. We stop on a mid-flight step (neither top nor bottom); I talk of being overseas and missing the death of my grandmother, of not being able to find my way home; I tell stories of being lost at sea. Thematically, I arrived at placelessness as an in-between (not detached from place but between places), creating its own character, its own sense of being-in-the-world. Practically, I found that place – its features and dimensions – are inextricably bound to the walk and its accompanying soundtrack.[iv]

The audio walk is, I found, most definitely a site-specific art. Mapping the route is in itself a complicated task. Timing and safety are important. (Will you slip on the stairs? Is there too much traffic – not enough? Will you get lost?) I walked the spaces of NYU’s Tisch building (where A Place Called Lost takes place) over and over, observing the interesting and banal features of its interior. Measuring its dimensions: five steps from the bench to the door; four then turn then three then turn then eighteen then stop. The stories I told needed to unfold in place, against the metronome of footsteps – and often, I ran out of steps mid-sentence.

In preparation, I pored over the transcript of Her Long Black Hair, attempting to dissect it into a basic “score” – a steady march of time across the X-axis and an ever-increasing stave of themes and storylines along the Y. The narrative threads alone were unfinished at:

finding photos

Harry Thomas

Beaudelaire and his mistress

Janet's memories of NY

Janet's dream fragments

man and his mother

Orpheo and Eurydice

Iraqi father and murdered daughters

death, loss

landscape of the park

history, history of the park

time (coincidences, inventions, ephemeralities)

walking

I wanted to unhinge the tracks Cardiff layered together, but montage is an unstable set of links, in a state of constant assembly and disassembly (Pearson & Shanks 52). Both in the making and in the walking, the journey seemed to rely on a good dose of coincidence, chance, and serendipitous construction.

I learned that the text – whether simple navigational instructions, descriptions of the surroundings, historical information, personal reflection, or semi-fictional stories – more often than not satisfied more than one thematic category. That is, timing (pace) and location (place) in the walk performed the narrative just as much as the stories I included.

Walking is a spatial acting out, a kind of narrative, and the paths and places direct our choreography. This regular moving from one point to another is a kind of mapping, a kind of narrative understanding... (Pearson in Pearson & Shanks, 138).

I learned that I had to maintain a balance between identifying/navigational information and expository/thematic stories. Some stories needed specific kinds of spaces in which to happen, and some stories came about as a result of spaces in which I found myself. And how to get from here to there was as much emotional as temporal or physical.

 

Midway through A Place Called Lost (listen clip 2), I take the walker on a long descent down a rather featureless stairwell while retelling a dream I had about travelling underground to the planet's core. Having scouted possible routes, I already knew that I wanted to use the stairwell – it had great big echoing sound, and its banality had thematic resonance. It was also practical – I needed to get from one floor to another and didn't want the unpredictability of waiting for an elevator to upset the timing of the walk.[v] I had written a draft of the text and knew I needed a relatively lengthy number of footsteps unbroken by navigational instruction. The repetitive banality of the stairwell worked in counterpoint to the rich fantasy of the dream; and the regular sound of my footsteps (9 steps, 2 steps landing, 4 steps…) recorded binaurally onsite, let walkers place themselves without the need for me to interject with "keep going," "turn here," or similar instructions used at other junctures.

I knew from Cardiff how important the soundtrack of actual footsteps recorded onsite is to the audio walk; how her pre-recorded steps became the soundtrack to my own. The spatially accurate binaural recording not only maps the walk’s route, but also maps the narrator’s previous presence along that route. This simple device creates a resounding of place and a reverberation of body in place coursing forwards and backwards in time, collapsing the narrator’s then and the walker’s now and making the ghostly body and time and place of the narrator an unseen but very real partner to the walk.

 

Four: Pause. March 2007

The everyday city is a cacophony of sounds and sights, an excess of indistinguishable noise, a myriad of possible pathways.

I am newly back in Australia, living on the side of a hill on the edge of Sydney’s Chinatown. The harsh Australian sun assaults my eyes and gives me headaches, glittering off the water in the harbour, off cars in high-speed parade along Parramatta Road. I take refuge in local cafés, sipping good Italian coffee, feeling thirsty in this drought-stricken land.

I am unhinging sound from place, listening to audio walks of Singapore and Münster[vi] as I walk the streets of Sydney. If sound has the power to place us, it also allows us to travel (over oceans as well as through time). This is sound’s power to tap into public imagination. A technology of time and place. The sound of raucous galahs always tells me I’ve woken up in Australia. The bustling marketplace with a call to prayer evokes Morocco. Louis Armstrong’s gravelly singing voice and the hiss of a scratchy record sends me back more than half a century. A specifically-accented voice gives me locale, and an urgent whisper fills me with apprehension. “As they course through the cosmos and the body, sounds maintain a tactile relationship with their source, an ‘umbilical continuity’…” (Erlmann 9).[vii]

 

Five: Designing Experience. June 2008

I duck quickly into the large entrance of Pier 2/3, shaking water from my head and coat and umbrella. Take a last look at needles of rain hitting the grey harbour, and turn into the gloom of the old covered wharf nestled under the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Faint sounds come from an opening at the far end of the first room: an army of marching feet getting louder as I walk towards them. I pass a dusty silent resurrection of Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori machines and Doreen Reid Nakamarra’s pulsating painting of the Marrapinti rockhole site near the Pollack Hills in Western Australia. Entering the next room I realise the music has faded; a bird caw overhead, a flap of wings, and my hollow footsteps lonely in the vast space. The smell of wet wood. I take a seat in a circle of chairs facing a megaphone horn on a rickety card table as an orchestra begins to play. It is just me, two gallery attendants bundled against the cold sitting discretely in dark corners, and a hundred speakers arrayed through the space.

I am visiting Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s latest installation, A Murder of Crows, commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art for the 2008 Sydney Biennale. Described as a “sound play” this work explores themes similar to Her Long Black Hair: danger, loss, and absence;[viii] creating alternate worlds where chases, searches, deaths or narrow escapes are common and the line between dreamt and real events is far from straightforward. This is the artists’ biggest installation to date and uses a range of techniques developed in previous works for distributing and shaping sound playback through the space.[ix]

Like Cardiff’s walks, the new installation is also site-specific. The pier’s high windows and heavy wooden structure, the waves lapping at its pylons below and the rain pouring off its eaves above, the working city and harbour just outside are visually and sonically part of the work. They enter it, combining with the elements imported by Cardiff and Miller. The installation too is very much about place, negotiating the tenuous divides between real, remembered and imaginary places. Both the audio walk and installation use cleverly spatialised sound to create sensorially immersive environments, which delineate the breadth and shape of the real space around me, and also somehow reach into an internal, imaginary, and affective space. It differs greatly from one of Cardiff's walks, however, and my interest lies in what its differences might reveal about the audio walks.

 

 

 

Just when does the performance begin? When I left home? Got off the bus? Came in the door? I am immediately missing the walk, and read in descriptions from my notes my eager desire to inject personal observations and coincidences from the outside world into the piece. An abandoned lifebuoy and pink spray painted numbers on each pillar (counting down to… I don’t know what) enter the dreamlike narrative as clues or not clues.[x] Does it matter – or are they clues to nowhere?

There is an element of personalisation in both pieces – I can walk in and out of A Murder of Crows at any time, possibly changing the narrative journey. However, I am aware that A Murder of Crows keeps looping through its half hour loop whether I am there or not. I came out of the installation feeling like I had seen a film (albeit one “seen” sonically), but Her Long Black Hair made me feel like I was in one.[xi]

Her Long Black Hair required my 45 minutes of walking for it to occur. The experience was deeply personal; in large part constituted by what memories and imaginings I brought to it, and by how I perceived the park and city around me. There was a balance, however, being negotiated between my participation and Cardiff’s organisation of my experience. I followed her route and her instructions, but it was precisely her limiting of the plethora of sensory stimulation that is present in Central Park that allowed for my individual experience. When I walked the route without the recording in the course of my research I felt unfocussed, my attention overwhelmed by many things I didn't notice when doing the audio walk. Janet works hard to gain your trust; she doesn’t lead you into harm’s way. She invites you into moments of vulnerability and potentially embarrassing or accident-inducing public displays (“put your finger in your mouth”, “close your eyes and keep walking forward”), but she is with you and when no accident happens, you trust her all the more. In many ways the feeling of the experience as intensely personal helps to obfuscate the feeling of external control. That is, the more personal you feel the experience is – the more that your body, thoughts, memories, and perceptions participate in it – the more successful it is.

In making A Place Called Lost, I was acutely conscious of crafting this relationship between the walker and myself as narrator. It is an intimate relationship requiring great trust (I am taking you somewhere that, at the outset, remains unknown to you). I needed to lead at times, and at times be followed (there is a difference). But I also needed to toy with this position to keep the walker engaged, striking a balance between directions that would confuse or comfort the walker.

The end of the walk takes participants into a warren of hallways in 721 Broadway's basement. I increasingly quickened my pace of walking, giving many instructions to stop, go, or turn corners, deliberating eliciting the walker's fear of getting left behind before surfacing into the familiar space of the building's lobby. I took walkers to borderline out-of-bounds spaces; for example, past doors marked "no entry" but which observation told me were always left open and posed no real danger.

Conversely, earlier in the walk I invite participants to rest midway down a long flight of stairs, moving from observations of the location to recollections of previous memories and deeply personal anecdotes (listen clip 3). While I deliberately tried to elicit emotional responses and make room for injections of personal memory and thought for the walker, I found these were elements I just couldn't predict. Rather, I tried to create an environment in which the implicit rules were not just go where I go, but also, indirectly, think/feel/dream as I do. I received responses in a feedback book that varied from the technical (“I was pleasantly surprised at how well our walking speeds matched, especially going down the long stairs”) to the surprisingly intimate and coincidental, for example:

– the places you take me – staircases, cityscapes, but also the death and the cold face of your grandmother (I think of the touch of my father’s face in his coffin last year – so cold, so smooth, so hard) – are yours but become mine.

– when the chorus came in it sounded so familiar, I fell into it. I opened my eyes at some point and then it was obviously Mozart… I realised I had sung the solo, seven years ago now. How could I forget that long note? That’s when the tears burst forward, talk about a lost part of my existence.

I realised that by organising the walker’s attention in the way that the walks can – when and what you taste, which way to walk and look, when to stop and when to go, at what pace to walk – I was actually making a space for the walker to inject what is particular to them into their version of the tour. The tour is, in fact, a co-production: we are making it together; I map my body onto yours, carving out a space around us both, away from potential sensory overload of the unmediated world. I realised that what separated Her Long Black Hair from traditional walking tours and other guides is that the ultimate “experience” was about being close to the narrator, merging with the persona of Janet. In this respect at least, the recording was not forcing mediation between me and the location, views, or objects of the tour. These objects are not what the walker really wants to get at, but Janet is. In the end Her Long Black Hair is not really a tour of Central Park, but a tour in which the goal is to see the world, experience the world, to get a feeling of being like Janet – to merge your body with hers in an oddly intimate embrace.

When I started working with audio, I really liked the way it included your whole body. It really created this physical connection. Also if you are walking with someone’s voice and the sound of their body, even if they’re saying silly things they become human. And if you’re walking for 15 or 20 minutes, it creates a relationship, it creates a one-on-one relationship – that’s one major aspect that has interested me a lot about the walks (Cardiff in Schaub 189).

 

Six: Inhabiting An/other. November 2007

In his book Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi works from the example of synesthesia to describe a mutually inclusive relation of space and time, which allows for what he terms biograms: “lived diagrams based on already lived experiences, revived to orient further experience… They are event-perceptions combining senses, tenses, and dimensions on a single surface” (186-7).[xii]

The clinical synesthete, called S in the medical literature, stored biograms as “objects” which he could re-access at designated turns along a meandering walk, similar to the 16^th century notion of the memory palace. When S came upon an object along the path, a multi-dimensional sense-fold of vision and proprioception and time would allow him to access a range of word and number memories that had been woven into the object (193).

Cardiff is herself aware of the connection between her work and the memory palace (Christov-Bakargiev et al 18). The early installation An Inability to Make a Sound at the Eye Level Gallery, for instance, involved a circuit of wooden planks upon which the headphoned gallery visitor walked, listening to Cardiff's recording played on a walkman. In the space were placed chairs, a table with two cups, and a projected film loop set off by infrared sensor. Like the journey of the orator through her mnemonically activated palace, here, "memories are associated with places and images in an architectural structure" (ibid). Massumi's conception of the biogram, however, more explicitly describes placement of the multi-sensorial and -temporal stuff of lived experience, the stuff of audio walks. Particularly, Massumi allows for place, body, and time (“senses, tenses, and dimensions”) folded together in the interrelated ways discussed so far.

Importantly, the biograms placed by the maker of an audio walk are to be accessed by another – the walker. While I previously claimed that the success of Her Long Black Hair lies in your ability to merge with the persona of Janet, she never says, “we are one” or “be like me.” In Cardiff’s walks, the merging of your body with hers is handled subtly; she plants the interior dimensions of her imagination in yours, she revives dreams and histories from near and far pasts, mapping her particular way of seeing the world onto the path you now walk. In Deidre Sklar’s terms, what is at work is a kind of kinaesthetic empathy, where the claim is that “moving with” people, a kind of corporeal imitation, opens up a “feeling with” kind of cultural knowledge not accessible through words or visual observation alone (11). At its simplest, you must adjust your socially and culturally inflected way of walking to walk in time with another.

This relationship between narrator and walker could be described as pedagogical. You are not just told where to go and what to look at, but inculcated into a certain way of moving, seeing and perceiving. This new, pseudo-habitus is not quite that of the narrator, though it is the narrator's biograms that you access. The walk teaches you to cultivate a certain relationship to and with your body, a certain attentiveness to it. Massumi points out, “Reaccessing the biogram and pulling a determinate strand of organized experience from it is to reapproach the point where the materiality of the body minds itself” (190, my emphasis).

That is, in the audio walks, you become hyper-attuned to the ways you fit or don’t fit, with yourself and with the other, and have to actively negotiate an in-between physicality. The fit is not easy or absolute. In my experience of Cardiff’s walk, her navigational instructions are almost uncanny in their timing. I never needed to consult the map of the walk route given with the portable player, and I very easily slipped into (but sometimes out of) the poetic, dreamlike rules of the piece. However I talked to other people who got lost because they couldn’t keep up or found the intimacy of the relationship forced; who felt coerced and therefore rebelled, stopping, fast-forwarding or rewinding the recording, or not doing the things they were told to.

The process is one of ongoing negotiation: your steps coincide for just a moment, and the stride you hear in the headphones could belong to your body. But no sooner than this happens, you fall out of step again. It is in the repeated failure that we understand and are attentive to our own ways of moving and being. The self's experience of merging and removal, or corporeal forgetting and awareness – Massumi's "body minding itself" – is elicited through intersubjectivity.

Sociologist Thomas Csordas has described what he calls somatic modes of attention: “culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others” (138, emphasis in original). Phenomenologically based, this idea takes the body and its perceptual abilities as neither arbitrary or natural, but culturally constituted. Perception, via Merleau-Ponty, along with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and an emphasis on the body as the locus of social practices, are important antecedents to Csordas’ work.

Intersubjectivity is also a vital ingredient for Csordas; occasions of somatic attention only become real through intersubjectivity. But what does this mean for your inter-relationship with the disembodied body of the audio walk narrator? The fact is, the narrator is another, constant body that you must interact with on the walk. But the narrator is made present through the sensual, sonic power of recorded sound: the grain of the voice and the sounds of the body reverberating in place, bring the spectre of the narrator into being. And this form of being is generated through your body. There is an unsteady and uneven inhabitation at play.

In an article on New York-based tourist company Soundwalk, Karen Shimakawa examines the company’s “ethnic” tours of Hasidic Williamsburg and Chinatown. The Soundwalk examples provide a more explicit conflation of self and other in illustration of this point. The CD jacket claims the soundwalks are “audio guide[s] for insiders”, however, there is in fact a tension between being “in” and “with”: I have heard their founder say both that the walks are about getting an inside look at a neighbourhood with a character you would want to spend an hour with, but also that they are about being “in the skin” of someone else (Crasneanscki). The latter indicates that the project is in part to be an insider for the duration of the walk, to inhabit a specific, other, customary body.

“Welcome to the Chinatown Soundwalk. I am going to take you around my neighbourhood. I’m waiting for you at the Luncheonette coffee shop, 89 Canal Street, at the corner of Canal and Eldridge Streets. Come inside and make yourself comfortable” (Soundwalk). Our guide, Jami Gong, goes on to say, “I was born and raised in Chinatown. These are my blocks, these are my streets, these are my people.” A few lines later he says, “The most important [rule] is to follow the rhythm of my footsteps. Be one with me.… Let me take control of your body and mind,” and at the end of the introductory track, he instructs us to “get ready to see, to smell, to touch, and to be Chinese” (ibid). (Listen clip 4.)

The tourist production has an imperative to both exoticise or make foreign, and offer a privileged insider experience. The question of whether it is possible to gain embodied or emplaced knowledge of being a culturally- or racially-situated, other body through the walking tour’s literalisation of walk-in-my-shoes – that is, whether we can successfully “be Chinese” as we are commanded to – is a moot one. Even if I am already Chinese, I am not Jami Gong. In my experience of the Chinatown soundwalk, as with Cardiff, I fell in and out of sync. My moments of falling out were dizzying and frequent (you want me to do/be what!?) and I often felt profoundly uncomfortable with the gap between Jami’s instruction to do things he would ostensibly do and my felt inability or even unwillingness to follow.[xiii] Most of Soundwalk’s neighbourhood walks involve going into shops and restaurants where the listener is instructed to buy something, or into normally “out of bounds” areas: for example, a senior citizens’ day centre or a private apartment building (to peer into a crack in someone’s door) in the Chinatown soundwalk. I found many of these almost impossible to do in part because I worried that I wasn’t really allowed to go there,[xiv] but also because standing against a wall listening to my iPod in a room full of people playing mah jong where I was the only person under 65 so obviously marked me as not an insider – a pill I found hard to swallow in an area I was quite familiar with. For me, both the suggestions of “natives on display” and the inevitable economic consumerism of the tourist trade reminded me that I was very much the outsider.[xv] More importantly, Shimakawa suggests that the failed attempt to “be” Chinese “puts us more firmly in our own bodies,” but that also, “The normal/normative ways in which we typically move through the world as unselfconscious agents of our embodiments is temporarily disrupted” (16-17).

To return to Massumi, “Under the biogrammatic heading, the personal is not intentionally prefigured. It is rhythmically re-fused, in a way that always brings something new and unexpected into the loop” (191). The something new for Shimakawa is a new space in which our own cultural/racialised/gendered soma is denaturalised, laid bare “as work” (18). My feeling is that they are teaching a mode of in-betweenness. In the audio walks, an interstitial sensibility enacted through emplacement within two acoustic spaces elicits an ongoing negotiation of your awareness (and forgetting) of your body in place, an exposition of interpersonal space and the fluid boundary between self/other that lasts beyond the performance of the walk.

 

Seven: Rewind. August 2005

My toes are close to the edge of the lake, my feet heavy on the spongy ground of fallen leaves and branches. I am breathing slowly, deeply, in time with Cardiff. Suddenly her breath fades and she is gone; she has brought me to where the path ends. I am alone with only the sound of my breathing and the rustle of the present around me. I have replaced her, become the guide and the guided.

I turn away from the water’s edge, walk back up to the main path and begin my return journey. The headset that has become almost forgotten around my head needs to be returned to the southern edge of the park. Heel rolls to toe, much as it always does, but differently too. I must choose my own way, mine the secrets and peculiarities of my own body and memory, unearth associations with the park, the city and my place in it. As I walk, the layers of time and history peel back – I see the age of the trees in their height, the formal intervention of the road beneath my feet; I see myself, just ten minutes before, walking over there with Cardiff in my ears, and longer, maybe eight years ago when I walked this way, when I too, like Baudelaire’s mistress, had long black hair. The past bubbles around me;[xvi] inscribed, like a map, in the body, in place. One layer under another, only just glimpsed at, momentarily cresting, before submerging under the wave of something new.

“My words here, now, like she was here, disappear even though I try to keep them, record them, play them over in attempts to hang on to time” (Cardiff).