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Sound Walks – Stories Taking Place
An intensive 3-day seminar.

Technological developments have sparked a new generation of creative sonic experiences and uncommon tours 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.

This seminar has been specially designed to teach and encourage audio producers and creative writers to reimagine the city, foster their creativity and sharpen their writing skills. To produce a successful site-specific 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 walks and interventions. It will offer technical tools and skill sets for navigating through this medium and finding your own path in this emergent art.

Over the course of three days, 10 to 14 participants will learn from a team of seasoned guest speakers and practitioners — radio auteurs & producers, performance 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) and a work-in-progress critiques 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, April 22th. – Sunday, 24th – 10am-5pm

Where: UnionDocs, 322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Who is eligible?
Open to everyone. We are looking for radio producers, media & sound 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 April 1st.
$450 regular
Please note that the service charge (about 3% of the amount) 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
Am: Pejk Malinovski
Pm: Alexandra Horowitz

The first day of the seminar looks in-depth at the ways we can tell stories about neighborhoods and places. It will include one field trip.

Day 2 : Itineraries
Am: Todd Shalom

The second day of the intensive focuses on writing and producing participatory walks in a specific site. It will include one field trip.

Day 3 : The listener’s experience
Am: Kara Oehler
Pm: Abraham Burickson (Odyssey Works)

The third day explores the multiple ways to build an audio experience and the possible tools to interact with the walker/listener.

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)
2:00p Presentation
3:15p Discussion
4:00p Workshop Exercise
5:00p End

BIO

Todd Shalom works with text, sound and image to re-contextualize the body in space using vocabulary of the everyday. He is the founder and director of non-profit participatory walks organization, Elastic City. In this role, Todd leads his own walks, collaborates with artists to lead joint walks, and works with artists in a variety of disciplines to adapt their expertise to the participatory walk format. He often collaborates with performance artist/director Niegel Smith. Together, they conceive and stage interactive performances in public and private environments. Todd is also a ringleader of Willing Participant. Willing Participant whips up urgent poetic responses to crazy shit that happens.

Todd is a member of the core faculty in Pratt Institute’s new MFA in Writing. His work has been presented by organizations such as Abrons Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, The Invisible Dog, ISSUE Project Room, The Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, P.S. 122 and Printed Matter. Todd is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at California College of the Arts and also holds a B.S. in Business Administration from Boston University.

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. Kara also worked with Detour, a new immersive, location-aware mobile app for audio walks. Currently, she’s making a film about a family in Summers County, West Virginia.

Pejk Malinovski is a poet and documentarian. His works have aired on Public Radio, BBC and radio stations around the world and been shown in museums and galleries. They have won prizes at festivals and competitions like Prix Europa, Sheffield International Doc festival and Third Coast International Audio Festival. In 2012 he launched Passing Stranger, an audio walking tour of the East Village’s poetry history. He was the co-creator and host of Thirdear, an online audio magazine and he continues to edit and translate books for Basilisk, a poet-run publishing house in Copenhagen. He is currently working on an audio walk about internet infrastructure in Lower Manhattan.

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 book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, was published January, 2013.

Abraham Burickson is the co-founder and Artistic Director of Odyssey Works, an interdisciplinary performance group that makes community-engaged bespoke performances for one-person audiences. Trained in architecture at Cornell University, Burickson’s work spans writing, design, performance, and sound art. For more than a decade with Odyssey Works, he has continually sought to push the boundaries of interdisciplinarity and participatory art, working in collaboration with poets, actors, sound artists, composers, psychologists, designers, architects, filmmakers, and more in an attempt to develop an artistic process that is as rigorous in its craft as it is devoted to the continual re-evaluation of traditional form. The New York Times has called his approach “a beautiful inefficiency.” His work has been profiled in the New York Times, The Believer, ArtInfo, Fast Company, Vulture, the Marina Abramovic Institute’s Immaterial, Archinect,the Stanford Storytelling Project, the SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, ARTE television, Metro NY, The Alcalde, and elsewhere, and he has lectured at such places as Gallaudet University, The Brooklyn Museum, Cornell University, Fordham University, The GoGame, and Southern Exposure Gallery. Burickson was trained in Architecture at Cornell University, and received his MFA in Poetry and Playwriting from the UT Michener Center for Writers in 2008.  In 2010, Charlie, a collection of his poems, was published on Codhill Press.2013 year saw the publication of Isolation and Amazement, a book about his 2012 New York Odyssey Works production He is the co-author (with Ayden LeRoux) of Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One, a book about new approaches to art and performance to be published by Princeton Architectural Press in the Fall of 2016. Burickson makes his home in Baltimore, MD.

Registration & Cancellation: To register for a workshop, students must pay in full via PayPal. After the early bird registration deadline of April 1st, 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.