Soundscape Project One:
Holding off our immersion into digital disruption and soundscaping, we began instead by remapping site through playful presence, invitations to explore, loiter, and listen; playfully pathfinding, transposing scores from one timespace to the next, shaking off our habitual uses and perceptions of Guelph’s campus. Leading queries for me at this juncture are; after our analogue adventures across the campus site, how might the addition of a digital placescape further disrupt the enfoldment of ambient, embodied, aesthetic and temporal contingencies – challenging an audients’ habitual reception of a place? How can additional layers of intermediality work with – and not against – the rhythms of the site?
We started to walk around the campus wondering how we can be more present in this campus? We needed some curious questions.
These are some of the questions that we asked ourselves:
Are there any mysterious stories about this campus? Any interesting hidden places on the rooftops or under ground? What are the layers of history of this campus? What was on this land before the campus? What kind of trees and animals are living around here? What kinds of sounds can you hear on this campus at different times of the year? What is the color of this campus in the winter? How about fall? Summer? Spring?
Did we make you curious too?
Steve Donnelly is a PhD student in Critical Studies in Improvisation at Guelph. His work and research explores and combines his interests in improvised play, performance studies, contemporary and historical uses of social space, popular culture, belief, and the commons.
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Shaghayegh Yassemi is a film maker and a performance artist. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s in Theater from Soore University in Tehran, Iran. She completed her second Master’s, in Film Production, at Concordia University in 2018. She started her PhD in Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph in 2020. Her research is focused on performance, poetry and their connections. Performance and poetry share liveness and presence as their essential elements, in different ways: exploring these two different approaches, and the way it can help awareness of presence in everyday life is another focus of her research practice.