Walking in the city
The cities streets were streets were they went to work every day, with no link any more to the dreamed chase. 21
The act of walking, writes Michel de Certeau, is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. 22 Walking is a spatial acting out of a place and it implies relations among differentiated positions in the form of movements. 23 Walking feet, as they map the path of a journey, are the expressive phenomena of storytelling. Urban walking has been elevated as a theme in the work of many contemporary artists as they take to the streets in an attempt to raise important issues about cultural geographies of the city relating to lived experience and memory. Canadian artist Janet Cardiff remarkably interpreted Michel de Certeau's Walking in the City in her 1999 audio-walk entitled The missing voice. Set in East London, this 40-minute aural art form is performed as the artist's voice reaches you through headphones from a CD recording as you trace the paths of her footsteps along her pedestrian journey. 24 The steps that make up this solitary walking tour are both actual and illusory. Likened to vexations in Calvino's Invisible Cities, Cardiff asks us to think about the real and imagined spaces of the city and the tension that plays out between them.
The artwork literally takes place in the streets, finding its meaning through its personified enactments. In effect it is performed or co-created by participants. The journey of The missing voice begins with footsteps at Whitechapel Library and ends at an entrance of Liverpool Street station. As the walk unfolds the listener gathers a sense of being a participant in detective fiction, caught up in the narrative yet aware of its fabrication. 25 The listener hears the walker's voice along with a myriad of sounds such as directions, intercutting voices and bursts of music interspersed with the 'space-between' pauses. De Certeau refers to this as the "phatic" aspect, those utterances within speech that initiate, maintain, or interrupt. 26 The interweaving of recorded sounds with those heard naturally pulls the listener in and out of reality. Fragments of conversations mingle with the noises of the city such as vehicles, sirens and a passing parade. Instructions to turn this way or that, wait here or cross the road make one acutely aware of the rhythm, pace and breath of the practice of walking, at once tactile, aural, and visual-an activity that enunciates and gives shape to urban spaces, it 'spatializes'. 27 Cardiff's The missing voice is an excellent interpretation of what De Certeau described as the 'pedestrian speech act', an appropriation of a topographical system-a spatial acting out of a place. 28
Students will create a similar performance-based aural experience using iPad technology, or other digital audiovisual media. Students will work in small groups to record the footsteps of their journey from one class to another documenting in first person the sounds, sights, thoughts, and interjected snippets of conversations that occur between the ringing of class period bells. Students may work with or without a script, but should storyboard their thoughts and movements prior to capture. In creating their version of the Cardiff production, students will plot the architectonics-pathways, intersecting nodes, borders, landmarks and destinations-of a travel story as an organized walk, a spatial practice. The goal is to experience the perception of a phenomenon through what is seen (optics), heard (phonics) and what is known (mnemonics) in an interpretation that analyzes the kinetics (movements) and histrionics (persons, actions, scenarios) of storytelling through visual media. Care should be taken when using technology equipment in crowded environments.
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