Sonic Pilgrims 1.0 (Garden City Booragoon)
Walk slowly. Let the sounds appear, slip away and return. There is no right path. Put your phone in your pocket and follow your ears, or use the markings on the map if you prefer. However you experience Sonic Pilgrims is up to you. Sonic Pilgrims is a site-responsive sound walk that places fragments of the natural world inside a built environment. Field recordings, composed sound and impressionistic voices bring traces of landscape, memory and reflection into the pace of everyday life. Voices arrive like partial memories and fragments of experience. The work explores a familiar contradiction: we know contact with nature is good for us, yet modern life can make that contact difficult. Here, birds, wind, forest and coast are carried into a shopping centre through headphones, GPS and mobile technology. Sounds may drift, overlap, arrive early, disappear or return unexpectedly and Sonic Pilgrims allows that instability to become part of the work. The building interferes with the experience, just as built environments can interfere with our connection to the natural world. You can drift and let sounds find you, or deliberately seek out voices using the map. Like a pilgrimage, listening here is not always immediate or efficient. It asks for a little attention, patience and a willingness to be led off course. The technology may be unpredictable, but so are nature, memory and our relationship with place. Nothing is completely fixed on the map. I'd like to sincerely thank the featured interviewees for their time and generosity: Catherine Adams, David Foster, Sam Gomme & Phil Knightly. This project was made possible through funding from the City of Melville Community Grants Program.
