PRESENCE – Time Project 4

Sofia, Varun, Nour and Echo

Presence of Paris

There are multiple ways through which one can feel the presence of his or her surroundings. This can be done by using all the main senses that makes a person feel connected. In this project we plan to explore one of these senses. Oliver Sacks wrote in his paper ‘The Mind’s Eye’ about how when a person’s certain sense stops to work or when a person tries to concentrate and see the world using his other sense than visual, he or she is able to see the world differently. The person gets to connect with the surroundings even more and gets to feel and listen further beyond.

To make this audio book we plan on using the non-narrative sounds to describe and define a place. These sounds are going to be the common sounds that a person can easily listen at certain places. For example to make the person feel as if he or she is in a metro we might add a sound which says stand aside the doors are closing, for a restaurant we might add the voice of a waiter taking the order and similarly add the sounds and voices which make us feel the presence of a place in this audio map. The collective sounds and voices together build a map and bring the presence of the city. These individual places define the city as a whole. We might string these voices in the order of a journey which might start from a bathroom in the morning and end in bed at night. Which might include all the places a general student or a tourist might visit in their day. The purpose is to make the audience feel that they are on a journey and feel the presence of the place when listening to this audio book and to use only their auditory senses to do so.

At the beginning, we had mixed ideas of what we wanted to make for this project. Our plan always included working with sound. At first we had the idea of making an audio guide of a path through Paris. We were inspired by the audioguides of Janet Cardiff, especially Her Long Black Hair (2004). We wanted to include sounds from Paris that symbolized our presence.

Janet Cardiff:

We were also inspired by the work of John Cage Imaginary landscape for 12 radios because of the artists ability to perform and manipulate sound.

We then opted for a more personal outlook to this path and we decided upon creating a sequence of sounds that orderly recorded a day in our life. Us and all our classmates are First Year students, meaning we just took an important step in our life, going to go live in a new place, leaving our hometown and starting a new life as students and artists, we have a similar routine. What we wanted to convey in our audience is a sense of belonging in the city of Paris and that of paying closer attention to the sounds of our everyday life. We don’t really pay attention to those kinds of details, which is what makes them valuable, the symphony of our day. We wouldn’t hear the same sounds if we were living in a city that wasn’t Paris, these are the sounds that the city is giving us.

For this project we worked cohesively and effectively so that everyone had their role. Nour and I made the notes and list of sounds as well as collecting the actual sounds, Varun worked on the editing and Echo wrote the presentation for the project.