SonicCity

SoniCity is an abstraction of various people's movements through space - an abstraction through sound.
It traces pathways and velocities and transforms the data into sonic reverberations.
The result is a map that unfolds through time - a that map reflects the complexity of human travel as experienced through flow.

SoniCity revolves around recording GPS tracks: data is brought into a Pure Data patch, parsed, then the individual GPS attributes
(i.e. Latitude, Longitude) are used to drive the sonic engine.

SoniCity allows us to think about public space and mobility in novel ways, creating a playful relationship to our journeys and their audible results.
We are not attempting to produce an objective cartography.
By drawing awareness to our patterns, it becomes possible to imagine alternatives – in shared spaces and in sound.
In this way, SoniCity becomes a tool for the derive - i.e. psycho-geographical exploration, and makes public space an instrument with which to play.

The project was conceived and started back in 2008 at the Almost Perfect locative media residency at the Banff New Media Institute, and was supported technically at that point by Brady Marks and Kenny Lozowski. Around 2010, the project was assumed as a project with my collective the memelab and went under a vast ideation process with my partner Mirae Rosner, whose experience in Urban Geography and Somatic Movement practice brought a great deal of theoretical investigation to the project. In 2012, the project was shown at the Nida Art Colony in Nida, Lithuania, and at the Tracing Mobilities exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. In 2013, I was offered an Artist Residency at DAIMON in Gatineau, Quebec, and further developed the programmatic elements of the the piece. The piece remains unfinished...

More (historical) information for the project can be seen on the memelab site, as well as a blog post here, and the source code for the project is available on my GitHub.