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Feb 16, 2017 at 7:08 pm
Stories Taking Place – Audio Walks and Site-Specific Storytelling
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[/su_spoiler]Reimagine the world around you, foster your imagination and improve your writing skills.
STORIES TAKING PLACE
An intensive 3-day seminar.
This seminar has been specially designed to teach and encourage audio producers and creative writers to reimagine the world around them, foster their creativity and sharpen their writing skills. To produce a successful audio program many skills are required, from research and journalism to sound storytelling to app designing, in addition to a considerable dose of observation, creativity and writing.
Produced by UnionDocs in partnership with Mathilde Walker-Billaud and Pejk Malinovski, the seminar will go into the various creative practices of site-specific audio interventions. It will offer technical tools and skill sets for navigating through this medium and finding your own path in this emergent art.
Radio audiences today have been liberated from the time and space limitations and can listen to audio anywhere at anytime: at home or at work, in the subway or in the streets, while queuing at the stores or taking a walk along the river. Technological developments have sparked a new generation of tours and sonic experiences through site-specific audio programs that are easily downloadable on mobile devices: a recorded and intimate voice guides an individual in a place and plays with the body, the imagination, the memory and the surroundings.
Over the course of three days, 10 to 14 participants will learn from a team of seasoned guest speakers and practitioners — radio auteurs, theater artists, writers, entrepreneurs, documentarists. The seminar will explore site-specific storytelling, sound design, audience engagement, instruction-based practice and more. Workshops, discussions, exercises, walks in the city (Field trips on Friday and Saturday) and a work-in-progress critique will help put this new knowledge into practice.
Pejk Malinovski, radio producer and poet, will lead the seminar as main instructor.
IMPORTANT FACTS:
When: Friday, February 13 – Sunday, February 15, 10am-6pm
Where: UnionDocs, 322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
Who is eligible?
Open to everyone. We are looking for students, radio producers, media artists, app designers and writers interested in places, audio practice and writing.
Give us an idea of who you are and why you are coming. When you register you will be asked for a short statement of interest that should briefly describe your experience in audio practice and a project idea (if you have one), plus a bio. There’s a spot for a link to a work sample and CV, which would also be nice, but is not required.
Please note: Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis. Focus is on discussions, observation, imagination and writing. The goal is to develop your project conceptually.
Cost:
$385 early bird registration by January 30th.
$450 regular
Please note that the service charge is waived if payment is made via check.
Checks can be made out to UnionDocs and mailed to 322 Union Ave, Brooklyn NY 11211.
Technology Requirements:
In order to keep costs down, this workshop is a b-y-o-m, bring your own material (laptop, headphones, recorder). Students must be fully proficient using and operating their computers.
Schedule:
(subject to change)
Day 1: Site-specific storytelling
Main Instructor: Pejk Malinovski
Guest Instructor : Alexandra Horowitz
The first day of the seminar looks in-depth at the ways we can tell stories about neighborhoods and specific places. It will include one field trip.
Day 2 : On-location participatory projects
Guest Instructor: Ant Hampton
The second day of the intensive focuses on writing and producing live interventions in an urban context. It will include one field trip.
Day 3 : The listener’s experience
Guest Instructor: Kara Oehler
The third day explores the multiple ways to build an audio itinerary and the possible tools to interact with the walker/listener. The afternoon will include exercises, discussions and project critiques.
Each day follows this general structure, with some minor variations and substitutions:
10:00a Warm up, inspiring references, listening exercises, ear training.
10:30a Presentation
11:45a Discussion
12:30p Share / Discussion / Exercise
1:00p Lunch (on your own – lunch will be provided on Friday)
2:00p Presentation
3:15p Discussion
4:00p Workshop Exercise
5:00p Workshop Critique
5:30p End
10:30a Presentation
11:45a Discussion
12:30p Share / Discussion / Exercise
1:00p Lunch (on your own – lunch will be provided on Friday)
2:00p Presentation
3:15p Discussion
4:00p Workshop Exercise
5:00p Workshop Critique
5:30p End
Staff
Ant Hampton made his first show as Rotozaza in 1998, a project which ended up spanning performance, theatre, installation, intervention and writing-based works, and often focussing on the use of instructions given to unrehearsed ‘guest’ performers, both on stage and in public settings, as detailed here. Rotozaza became a partnership with Silvia Mercuriali, and ended in 2009 after their last production Etiquette, which was also the first Autoteatro ‘show’. Since then Ant has worked with Glen Neath, Joji Koyama, Isambard Khroustaliov, Tim Etchells, Gert-Jan Stam and Britt Hatzius to create the work detailed here – over 48 different language versions exist of the various productions created so far.
Other solo projects include ongoing experimentation around ‘live portraiture’ as The Other People (La Otra Gente): structured encounters with people from non-theatrical milieu. He was head dramaturg for ‘Projected Scenarios’ at Manifesta7 Biennial for Contemporary Art and has contributed to projects by Jerome Bel and Forced Entertainment. Prior to their recent collaborations (‘The Quiet Volume’, and ‘Lest We See Where We Are’) Ant worked with Tim Etchells for the 2009 ‘fantasy-protest’ programme of live-art for the ICA, ‘True Riches’.
His 2005 collaboration with Britt Hatzius, ‘This Site Could Be Yours’ involved invitations to over 20 artists and writers in a reflection on site-specific performance, photography and feasibility, and continues to produce off-shoots including a workshop, ‘Fantasy Interventions – Writing for Site-Specific Performance’. Ant has also worked as coach / mentor for artist programmes such as MAKE (Ireland), A-PASS, Sound Image Culture (Beligum) and, most recently in late 2013, Dasarts (Netherlands) where in collaboration with Edit Kaldor he designed and mentored a 10-week block, ‘Every Nerve’.
Kara Oehler is a documentary artist, radio producer and media entrepreneur. Over the past decade, Kara has been leading innovation at the intersection of storytelling and technology, building new structures for creative expression and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is the Co-Founder of GoPop, an app for juxtaposing GIFs, photos and videos; Zeega, the revolutionary interactive storytelling platform; metaLAB (at) Harvard, a research center focused on network culture housed at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; the UnionDocs Collaborative Studio, an innovative model for documentary arts education and production; Yellow Arrow:: Capitol of Punk, an interactive documentary tracing DC’s punk rock history; and Mapping Main Street, the collaborative documentary produced with NPR and featuring 10,466 streets named Main. Her Peabody award-winning radio work has aired on shows like RadioLab, Marketplace and Morning Edition and her interactive storytelling projects have been exhibited at MoMA and SFMoMA. She’s been a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute’s New Frontiers Story Lab, a judge for the Knight News Challenge, a Film Study Center Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Rockefeller Fellow with United States Artists. Currently, Kara is working with Detour, a new immersive, location-aware mobile app for audio walks. She’s also working on a film about a family in Summers County, West Virginia.
Pejk Malinovski is a freelance radio producer, sound artist and poet. His documentaries have aired on PRI, BBC, National Danish Radio and his sound pieces have been shown in museums and galleries. He has worked extensively with location-based proejects and created over 40 site-specific audio pieces for the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, in 2012 he launched Passing Stranger, an audio walking tour of the East Village’s poetry history. He was also the co-creator and host of Thirdear an online audio magazine. In 2014 his radio meditation Everything, Nothing, Harvey Keitel won Best Radio Drama at Prix Europa.
Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years she shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and served on the staff of The New Yorker. She lives in New York City with her husband, young son, and Finnegan, a dog of indeterminate parentage and determinate character. Her latest book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, was published January, 2013.
About On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes:
From the author of the giant #1 New York Times bestseller Inside of a Dog comes an equally smart, delightful, and startling exploration of how we perceive and discover our world.
Alexandra Horowitz’s On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes shows us how to see the spectacle of the ordinary—to practice, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, “the observation of trifles.”
On Looking is structured around a series of eleven walks the author takes, mostly in her Manhattan neighborhood, with experts on a diverse range of subjects, including an urban sociologist, the artist Maira Kalman, a geologist, a physician, and a sound designer. She also walks with a child and a dog to see the world as they perceive it. What they see, how they see it, and why most of us do not see the same things reveal the startling power of human attention and the cognitive aspects of what it means to be an expert observer.
On Looking is nutrition for the considered life, serving as a provocative response to our relentlessly virtual consciousness. So turn off the phone and other electronic devices and be in the real world—where strangers communicate by geometry as they walk toward one another, where sounds reveal shadows, where posture can display humility, and the underside of a leaf unveils a Lilliputian universe—where, indeed, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.
Workshop Policies:
Registration & Cancellation: To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via PayPal. After the early bird registration deadline of January 30, course fees are not refundable or transferable and any withdrawals or deadlines will result in the full cost of the class being forfeit. There will be no exceptions. To withdraw from a course please email info-at-uniondocs.org.
In the event that a workshop does not receive sufficient enrollment, it may be canceled. Students will be notified at least 48 hours prior to the start of a cancelled workshop and will be refunded within 5 business days. If we reschedule a workshop to another date, students are also entitled to a full refund. UnionDocs reserves the right to change instructors without prior notification, and to change class location and meeting times by up to an hour with 48 hours prior notice.
