Presentation: "The Soundwalker in the Street: Location-based Audio Walks and the Poetic Re-imagination of Space" The development of mobile and location-based technologies intensifies media use in public space. Media theorist Eric Kluitenberg emphasizes this emerging trend, as he notes that the city becomes an intensified mediatized space where the modus operandi is carried out almost without thinking. The aim of this article is to show, with the use of location-based audio walks as case studies, how this intensive hybridization of space on the contrary is able to provide new possibilities to engage with space. The power of location-based audio walks is its aesthetic and poetic potential of layering new information over a physical space, while revealing the stories, memories and history of specific physical locations. In doing so, these audio walks can be seen as a poetic act: they draw together human involvement and invite engagement with reality to such an extent that it enters consciousness and it reimagines space poetically.

1. THE SOUNDWALKER
IN THE STREET
Location based audio walks
and the poetic re-imagination
of hybrid space
by Micky van Zeijl

2. “Customary patterns of
spatial behavior...have
been obilerated in little
more than ten years
with the mass-adoption
of mobile phone
technology”

3. MAIN CONCERN
Only when the operator is down, these
patterns enter consciousness
-ERIC KLUITENBERG (2010)

4. CALL TO
INVESTIGATE
How can this new
sensibility for an
increasingly hybridized
spatial multiplicity be
intensified to such
an extent that it can
enter consciousness,
that is can be re-
imagined poetically?

5. KEY STARTING POINT
This intensive hybridization provides
new possibilities to engage with public
space

6. HYBRID SPACE
The technological blurring
of spatial borders with
social and communicational
interactions, as well as
the aesthetic, cultural and
imaginary elements and
experience of space
-DE SOUZA E SILVA, KLUITENBERG, MANOVICH,
SIKIARIDI & VOGELAAR
AND MORE ...

7. POETIC ACT
While walking, traveling and
interacting with space, it
connects and shapes one’s
memory and experience.
POETICS
Refers to engagement and
performativity. It shows how
memory and dreams play an
active role in the multiplicity of
hybrid space.
-BACHELARD (1964), KLUITENBERG (2010)

8. HOW THEN CAN WE RE-IMAGINE
SPACE POETICALLY?

9. POSTPHENOMENOLOGY
By Peter-Paul Verbeek focusses
on the mediating role of
technology, where reality arises
in a network of relations, as
do the human beings who
encounter it.
-PETER-PAUL VERBEEK WITH REFERENCE TO
DON IHDE, BRUNO LATOUR & ALBERT BORGMANN

10. Albert Borgmann
engagement
Bruno Latour Don Ihde
active actors artifacts

11. LOCATION-BASED MEDIA
make it possible to create
specific content for physical
locations and to locate
one’s presence in space
an important characteristic
of location-based
applications is thus the
creation of a doubled
perception of space.
- KLUITENBERG (2010)

12. LOCATION-BASED AUDIO WALKS
The power of location-based audio walks
is its aesthetic and poetic potential of
layering new information over a physical
space, while revealing its stories, memories
and history. It provides the technoogical
potential of engagement with surrounding
space

13. UPLABS/
iWHISPER DE TAPES 7SCENES

14. By moving away from
the visual dominance
of the screen, the aural
augmented layar of the
location-based audio
walks makes room for
the physical surroundings
to become a part of
the overall embodied
experience.

15. to
The poetic involvement with the
physical location is mediated
through location-based
technologies. while walking around
or standing still, listening to these
stories, one relates to and is present
in one’s own personal and public
surrounding world.

16. to
LOCATION-BASED AUDIO WALKS
Engage one in the surrounding space.
to
They draw
together human
involvement and
invite engagement
with reality. In doing
so they are able to
re-imagine space
poetically.