Perceiving Academy

How do we hear our cities today? How do we measure things on their own terms? How do we cultivate and sustain embodied knowledge within the synthetic spatial narratives of the spaces we have in common? PERCEIVING ACADEMY engages a kind of Urban Emotional Epidemiology, with a Discourse of Doing, while engaging public space, publics, different takes of democracy, geographic landscapes, politics, language and food. PERCEIVNG ACADEMY materializes as ephemeral place-makers, a kind of urban theater, a web-site, and a material object (lathed vinyl; photography monograph; book or recipes and procedural poems). A trust space emerges. And the participants of the PERCEIVING ACADMEY learn how to learn differently.

Every mark on the Urban Score corresponds to a sound, every sound to a measured urban system, like plantings, bollards, man-hole-covers, colors, etc. There is a perceptually rigorous, quantifiable spatial and sound correspondence between the distances in the city - the spacing out of the rotational marks in the drawn score - the rhythms in the sound recordings.

The loop is divided into 11 sections. Each participant maps at least 4 systems found along their section of the loop (doors, colors, cats, trees...) Each system is assigned a graphical notation. Each notation receives a sound, A kind of 'Concrete Poetry' evolves, an Urban Score. The spacing and relation of the city becomes the rhythm in the recordings.

Those sounds and sound maps are taken into a sound engineers recording studio and recorded as layers. The layers are superimposed on each other. The image (the cover art) can be read and heard here. The image was used in a public performance/walk that took place at the end of the Perceiving Academy.

This is the A SIDE of the record; the B SIDE is comprised of interviews and ethnographic conversations around food, bread, flour and place.