Pacific Street Fieldwork

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The Sounds of Pacific Street: 7 Walks

Operating at one remove, at least, from daily life, an opening is created in art through which to ‘project ourselves mentally outside of the world as it is given to us. In this way it invents, concretely, futures other than the one inscribed in ‘the order of things’, calling into question the categorical use of value of the art/life distinction as a political ‘strategy of tension’    -Loic Wacquant ‘Critical Thought as Solvent of Doxa’

My study of common place and everyday life is focused on the street where I live  (Pacific Street, Brooklyn, New York).

The field study began with a bike ride, mapping the beginning and end of my street. I made notes of vacant buildings, community gardens, schools, businesses, street life, etc.

The project developed into an idea of taking a series of sound-recorded walks, in an effort to understand the language of a place.

I decided to take 7 different walks at different times of day. The walks would follow everyday paths to or from my home, and lead to the market, a fruit stand, the subway, an ice cream truck, a book store, etc.

The recordings act as one anonymous voice, created collectively by the greater community around me.

THE SOUNDS OF PACIFIC STREET & EVERYDAY LIFE:

The recordings were taken on long summer days and nights, a time when the city does not sleep. The streets are filled with sounds 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Radios, car horns, service trucks, trains, motorcycles, emergency vehicles, buses, cell phones, conversation, machinery, construction, weather patterns,  all contribute to the language of a community.

How does the language of a community effect our behavior?

How do varied audio signals  relate to our actions and interactions?

How can we curate or manipulate the language of our community?

Lingering, red lights, rush hour, day and night all play a role in the final recordings. As the recorder I can manipulate the recordings by choosing where to cross the street, how fast to walk, etc.

7 WALKS: 24 DESTINATIONS

The recordings will take you to the following places…

1. Home

2. Mailbox

3. ATM

4. Supermarket

5. Pharmacy

6. Laundromat

7. Subway (Manhattan bound)

8. Bodega

9. Empty lot/ garden

10. Fruit stand

11. Roti Shop

12. Subway (Queens bound)

13. Long Island Railraod

14. Bike path

15. Pacific/Nostrand intersection

16. Pacific/Atlantic intersection

17. Caribbean Foods

18. Bravo Food Market

19. Dollar Store

20. Bus stop

21. Pacific/ Fulton intersection

22. Pacific/ Bedford intersection

23. Pacific/ New York intersection

24. Seven Eleven, convenient store

AN ANONYMOUS VOICE:

Michel de Certeau. Passage from ¨The Practice of Everyday Life¨:

This anonymous voice is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect representations. He squats now at the center of our scientific stages. The floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. The increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details-parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives that formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. We witness the advent of number . It comes with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.

The Sounds Pacific Street: Walk 1

Pacific Street and Nostrand (afternoon)

The Sounds of Pacific Street: Walk 2

Pacific Street and Nostrand intersection (morning)

The Sounds of Pacific Street: Walk 3

Subway station (ticket booth and platform)

The Sounds of Pacific Street: Walk 4

Pacific Street (Sunday morning)

The Sounds of Pacific Street: Walk 5

Waiting for train (evening)