Low Tech CitySound
Installation + Participatory Electronics Sound Walk
Shenzhen’s Urban Sounds Through Low Tech Electronics
In Collaboration with Bo Dong + Zhaorui Liu
2024
“Low-Tech CitySound” is a project in which 11 young adults built their own low-tech audio recorders and took these recorders on a soundwalk through Shenzhen to collect site-specific sounds from the city. In the installation on display, the audience interacts with the mediated sounds via a custom-made interface, thereby producing a narrative out of the sound recordings and accompanying location video fragments. “Low-Tech CitySound” is based on a workshop that the SUSTech School of Design’s Sound Studies Group conducted earlier this year, where young adults learnt to solder electronic circuits and design their own shape of a wearable recorder. These devices look like low-tech electronics but have high-tech features that allow them to record, store, and playback environmental recordings. The participants used the self-made wearable recorders to capture sounds of their liking in the city, and brought them back into the exhibition, where we can relive their individual perspectives on the soundscape of Shenzhen. Yet, this present soundscape is highly mediated and “distorted” through technology that blends “low-fi” with “high-fi” – thereby reflecting the core spirit of Shenzhen. “Low-Tech CitySound” explores how technology and cities are always connected in diverse ways, showing the intersectional space of low and high tech.
#Shenzhen Soundscape
#Low Tech Electronics
#Participatory
Production team: Bo Dong (workshop, installation), Zhaorui Liu (electronics + tech development), Simeng Wang (workshop), Binghuang Xu (field work)
The workshop took place at, and first public exhibition, at SeeD Creative Commune’s “SeeDling Art Fair,” Shenzhen, 2024.
Exhibited at the Chinese CHI Symposium (juried exhibition), Shenzhen, 2024.