:: listen now (adjacent) ::

exploration citywide :: 5.27 - 5.29

documentation CUBE2 :: 5.19 - 6.4

website situationalaudio.org

Listen Now is an ongoing series of environmental recordings. They invite a displacement in the act of listening, from one person to another, one time and place to another. Listening always takes place in the present but sounds are also tied to the moment of their making. By now we take the displacements of sound recordings for granted, but there is still something uncanny about them. A sound environment is an unrepeatable composition, continuously unfolding whether we give it our attention or not.

For the "Adjacent" series, I'm focusing on streets outside of where my friends live and work. Beginning at my own front door, and spiraling outward, I'll be gathering recordings of street sounds throughout May and June. Each site will be marked by a Listen Now sticker, with a number that links to the recording from that site. The recordings will be posted on situationalaudio.org, and will be available as podcasts. Listeners are invited to carry the sounds back into public space and listen to them either adjacent to where they were made (a displacement in time) or outside the living and working spaces of their own friends (a displacement of space and social network).

During the Provflux, I'll be inviting Provflux participants to lead me to their own significant spaces. While I record the street adjacent to the chosen space, the participant will be able to listen to street sounds from significant places of mine on a portable audio player.

about the artist

Sal Randolph works in the areas of social architectures, gift economies, and participatory artworks. She is the founder of Opsound (http://opsound.org), an experimental record label and open sound pool of copyleft music. Her other projects include The Free Biennial (http://freebiennial.org) and Free Manifesta (http://freemanifesta.org) which brought together several hundred artists in open shows of free art in the public spaces of New York and Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as Free Words (http://freewords.org) in which 4000 copies of a free book have been infiltrated into bookstores and libraries worldwide. She as also recently started INTHECONVERSATION (http://intheconversation.com), a website for texts and conversations about experiential and participatory art. Randolph's work has been presented in the public environments of New York, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin and other cities, as well as in gallery and museum exhibitions including Manifesta 4, and Don't Miss in Frankfurt am Main, BüroFriedrich Gallery and the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst (NGBK) in Berlin, the PsyGeoConflux in New York, and the Oni Gallery in Boston. She performs with her electroacoustic band, Weapons of Mass Destruction.