Reading Response 1

1. Identify the article you have selected and why you chose it.
I chose the "This American Life" article because the title seemed interesting . The article talks about artists who've made maps using the five senses, sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste. Each summer these people pick a sense and only using that sense they map out a piece of their world. These people pay very close attention to detail in order to bring a sense of reality to their maps. This article considers maps to be very important because they focus on a particular street or region. According to the article this is "the age of maps" just about all of the maps in the world today have been created within the last 100 years.

2. What are the main points of the essay?
One of the main points of this article is to show how important maps are to our world, and how the world we live in can be completely remapped based on our senses. Some of these people like Dennis Wood, would create maps out of addresses of a certain neighborhood. He also made maps out of graffiti in the neighborhood and he believes these maps represent these neighborhoods and show the potential of the whole world. Toby Lester, another map creator would make maps based strictly on sound he focuses on the harmonies of everyday sound which was inspired by a distraction between his heater’s hum and computer’s fan. There’s also an electronic nose which will be able to track smells like “decaying bacteria”, and Channel Perfume which are the only smells it can really identify until more research will be done. The electronic nose is expected to be used first for mainly, scientific purposes because it can detect certain gas sensors. There’s also a women who made a map using touch by listing possible diseases and her obsessive hypochondria behavior. She talks about her life within the last ten years by explaining her lumps, cramps, and rashes which she believed would be a symptom to some severe condition. For example the year 2005 for her would be mapped out as the year of the brain tumor and for weeks she would be convinced that she had bad headaches and that she feels a knot by her ear which is the “tumor”.

3. How are the ideas or arguments in this article relevant to your own practice as a media artist?
Media and the five senses kind of work hand in hand because most mediums include visual and audio examples. This article sort of put a an emphasis on our senses and it sort of opened up a creative window for me because I got the idea that I can use other senses besides sight and hearing to make media projects. The idea of making maps focused on nothing else but sound or smells is intriguing because most people only visualize maps as a visual source and don’t realize that the visual is so much more because of the things you smell or hear or taste in that particular area.

Soundwalk

Were you able to find places and spaces where you could really listen? Yes, we sat out on the side by the Mitchell building next to the bus loading area.

Was it possible to move without making a sound? Not exactly, were sitting in the grass so whenever someone moved, you could hear the grass ruffling under thier feet/body.

What happened when you plugged your ears, and then unplugged them? It sounded like a seashell, everything seemed to be at a distance and there was no particular noise you could hear just a shallow, airy sound.

In your sound log exercise, what types of sounds were you able to hear? List them.
Leaves Crunching
Laughter
Trees and wind swishing
Car/Bus engines
Planes
Shoes ruffling in grass
Bus or Truck beeps(backing up)
Girl coughing
Squeaky brakes
Keys
Food wrappers(Burger King)
Phone vibrating
Paper blowing in wind
Birds
Kids

Were you able to differentiate between sounds that had a recognizable source and those sounds you could not place? Yes because I usually hear alot of these sounds on a daily so alot of them are easy to name.

Human sounds? Mechanical sounds? Natural sounds? All,people were constantly walking by, listening to thier iPods, talking amongst themselves,etc. Cars and busses were the loudest the busses brakes were really squeaky and cars would constantly zoom by or people would honk at the pedestrians. The wind was also blowing constantly so we could hear the leaves and branches brushing up against one another.

Were you able to detect subtleties in the everpresent drone? Yes I could hear the humming of some of the buildings that were close by.(Mitchell, the Arts Building and the Union.)

Extremely close sounds? Sounds coming from very far away? I was close to a bush and a tree so I could hear the birds chirp even with my ears closed;I couldn't really hear much far away though, maybe music from peoples' cars.

What kinds of wind effects were you able to detect (for example, the leaves of trees don't make sounds until they are activated by the wind)? I could hear alot of swishing with the bushes and trees, there was also paper ruffeling from our notebooks.

Were you able to intervene in the urban landscape and create your own sounds by knocking on a resonant piece of metal, activating wind chimes, etc.? Yes we heard slight echoing when we tapped a medal ramp handles and at a certain angle in the corner of the Lubar building.

Do you feel you have a new understanding or appreciation of the sounds of our contemporary landscape/cityscape? Yes, not exactlly new though just a little bit of an altered understanding because our focus was to try to describe some of the noises we heard with words and some sounds can't be described. It was also a little intresting to try and see how far I could actually hear.

How do you think your soundwalk experience will affect your practice as a media artist, if at all? As a media artist I am now more aware when it comes to sound, as a media artist my aim would be to find new ways to explore sound and experiment with my results.