Please Follow the Sound of My Footsteps - Sound, Walk and the Mediated Milieu in Janet Cardiff’s Audio Walks

• Main Authors: Li, Yueh-Tuan, 李悅端
• Other Authors: Lai, Wen-Shu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/p43266

博士 === 國立交通大學 === 應用藝術研究所 === 103 === Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, the prominent artist of “audio walk”, uses pre-recorded audio streams, combining mobile technology with personal headphones, that guide people to walk in a specific area or along a prescribed route. As an increasingly significant mode of artistic and cultural practice over the past two decades, “audio walk” reconfigures contemporary urban spaces in aspects of geographical, affective, and sensory experiences. The artworks of audio walk by Janet Cardiff are fantastic in the sense that they conflated acoustic technologies and narrative strategies to construct a mediated world, and then situated participants in the virtual world that was inextricably intertwined with the physical surroundings. At once as a form of perception and a form of art that emphasized transforming the ambiance of urban spaces rapidly with playful directives and events, her walks can genealogically be traced back to the “urban drifting” of the Situationist International in the 1950s. But this article wants to argue that Cardiff’s walks were built upon what we see and what we hear, namely two different worlds split by earphones listening. The multi-layered sounds in the later were comprised mainly of verbals, soundscape and rhythmic motion reified in Cardiff’s on-site recording and walking. These sound recordings were subsequently relocated and actualized by the participants through listening and walking at the same location. These sounds overlapped the milieu, thereby creating the effects of spatial splices and mis-recognition. This article concludes, by way of examining her major walking artworks, that these sensory gaps and extensions in “audio walk” are worthy of exploration not only because they indicated the possibility for heterogeneous spheres, but also because they served as a reflexive reference that enables the participants to (re)identify the creation of the mediated world as well as their relations to it.