Miastofon
Project creators: Gruby Punkt Urban Lab (Agata Ruchlewicz-Dzianach, Łukasz Dzianach) + Invited guest participants: artist Anna Wejkowska-Lipska and Italian experimental musician Niet F n.
Miastofon is a purely acoustic interactive online map. Based on sound only, all visual aspects have been eliminated. It can be explored by moving an invisible cursor around the invisible map.
The recordings were made during spontaneous explorations of randomly discovered, often inconspicuous sites in Gdańsk New Port. The project was created in cooperation with blind and partially sighted people during three months of special workshops on sound and psychogeography at the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art.
Two types of sounds can be activated on the map: voices of project participants describing their feelings about the spaces around them, and ambient city sounds. Miastofon is an experiment in layering subjective urban soundscapes with field recordings. The project aims to accentuate the multi-textured sonic landscape by inviting you to listen actively to the city.
Miastofon is part of the SubjectiveMap initiative, a project focused on mapping sites subjectively to emphasise emotional perceptions of the space and explore non-material urban layers.
Agata Ruchlewicz-Dzianach
Artist, designer, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. In her artistic and research work, she investigates the relationship between humans and the urban space, focusing on the subjective and emotional perception of the environment.
Co-founder of the GrubyPunkt Urban Lab. Its main initiative is SubjectiveMap – a project of subjective mapping of places that focuses on intangible urban layers. It is based on spontaneous exploration of places and involves participants that are often excluded from everyday discussion about urban space (e.g. seniors, immigrants or blind people). The project has been presented at various festivals and exhibitions, among others 8th International Festival of Creativity, Innovation & Digital Culture ESPACIO ENTER (Tenerife, ES), Post Screen Festival - International Festival of Art, New Media and Cybercultures (Lisbon, PT), EME3 BOTTOM-UP Festival (São Paulo, BRA), Architecture as human nature exhibition (Berlin, DE) or the 7th EME3 International Architecture Festival (Barcelona, ES) and conferences, including Memory Studies Association (University of Copenhagen, DEN), Urban Culture at the Crossroads (the University of IUC in Dubrovnik, HR) and QUAM (Center for Contemporary Art in Vic, ES).
She participated in Festival Strangelet (Vigo, ES), Platforma 11 (Leipzig, DE), Stores Art Attack Projects (Abrantes, PT) and 24h BRL/GDA (Gdańsk, PL). She is a member of international network Women in Architecture.
Project presented during the Digital Cultures Festival:
Miastofon
