Schizoid Cityscapes

Schizoid Cityscapes

Sound-walk installation

Materials: found urban environment, binaural cityscape recordings, mp3 players, headphones, printed map & instructions
Dimensions: app. 3 kilometers

Conceived & produced during and following a D.I.V.A. residency, Copenhagen, DK & Athens, GR 2013

Image: photo compositing, Athens, GR & Istanbul, TR 2013 (c) Marinos Koutsomichalis

Schizoid Cityscapes questions the integrity of an urban environment by means of substituting their acoustic content.

The audience is invited to follow a predefined route in the city while listening through headphones to audio recordings of equivalent sound-walks in other cities.  A non-topos is established this way, wherein two equally valid, yet contradictory, realities antagonize and clash. While a city is ostensibly redefined by means of another, strong conceptual and semantical links are forged between them. Such links are not arbitrary, but rather pinpoint on  cultural, historical, political and social (de-)correlations with respect to the particularities of the proposed route and the selected audio material. Eventually, schizoid cityscapes triggers an interrogation of the very ways in which an urban environment defines its inhabitants.  In the case of Athens, the city is juxtaposed with ambulatory recordings realized in the cities of Amsterdam, Florence, Gent, Istanbul and York.

Exhibitions

Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, GR (2013).

IMG_0836

Schizoid Cityscapes @ the Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art and an excited visitor, Athens, GR 2013 (c) Marinos Koutsomichalis.

marinosbside

Proposed route, Athens, GR 2013 (c) Marinos Koutsomichalis.