Flowing Sound
Mobile Media Installation + Artistic Research
Portable, Low-Fi Sound Sources in Shenzhen City
With a Dictionary of Moving Sound Sources
With Yaohan Zhang and Yujing Ma
2024
“Flowing Sound” takes as its starting point the idea that much of the sound in Shenzhen is dynamic and is “flowing,” that is, it is emitted from portable, moving technological sources that span a provisional sonic network across the city, thereby connecting “low tech” and “high tech” purposes and neighborhoods with one another. What emerges is an “aural economy” (Molina 2020) in which technological sound and media sources can teach us something about Shenzhen-Pingshan. The artwork is based on intense fieldwork to collect, record, and track moving media and sounds in the city. The project team then categorizes the found media and is in the process of developing and establishing a dynamic “working dictionary” of moving media and sound sources of Shenzhen. Collected sound sources are brought back into the street on a provisiaonal cart, enabling conversations with the community around sonic ephemera in the city. The results of both the dictionary and the street performance are exhibited as mobile installation with LED screens and low-fi loudspeaker devices in a gallery. “Flowing Sound” combines sound, video, performance, community-participation, background research, fieldwork, computational data analysis and visualization, and a digital archive building into a multimodal artwork and a body of artistic research.
#Aural Economy
# Urban Sound
#Portable Sound Sources
#Low-Tech Sound
First exhibited at PAM Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2024)
Production team: Yaohan Zhang, Yujing Ma, Xiaoyao Ma, Sihui Li, Ziye Chen