Port Hope Soundscapes is a project by Critical Mass: A Centre for Contemporary Art
The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit was commissioned by Critical Mass to create and develop immersive soundscape experiences played through a GPS-guided walking app in Port Hope.
The text on this map represents the 22 resulting soundscapes, produced through conversations with over two dozen Port Hopians of all ages. The soundscapes are collaged from of snippets of conversation, site field recordings and found sounds. Strata-Walking Port Hope provides a glimpse into the memories, stories, histories, and sonic environments of Port Hope.
Below is a sampling of some of the soundscapes.
Map/App Interface design and soundscape editing by T.Ng-Chan Drawings by Donna Akrey
Bandshell
In the park downtown is a bandshell, where Port Hopians gather in the summer to listen to music and play.
Main Street
Every town has a Main Street.
Factory
Some stories about the Factory…
This project was made possible with funding from Ontario Trillium Foundation.
Critical Mass: A Centre for Contemporary Art brings contemporary art to our community for all to experience because we believe art stirs our feelings and challenges how we see the world and our place within it. Their mission for the 2020 Port Hope Soundscapes project is to provide socially-engaged sound artists with an opportunity to play an active role in our community — creating art experiences that will help shape the cultural vibrancy of Port Hope. http://criticalmassart.com/soundscape-project-overview/
OTHER CARTOGRAPHIES: PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP IN CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, AUGUST 11, 2023. Organized by the International Cartographic Association’s Commission on Art and Cartography.
The goal of this workshop was to provide an intellectual and creative space to share different ideas around artistic methodologies of mapping and engaging with space and place, particularly those that challenge the status quo of capitalism, colonialism, extractive resource development (etc., the list is long) — experimental cartography practices through a lens of sustainability. The workshop was linked to the 31st International Cartographic Conference but open to all. The day’s presentations included:
Strata-Walking in Cape Town The Strata-Walk is the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit’s framework of stratigraphic place-making and mapping. This experimental, emotional, ephemeral cartography relies on the body-as-sensor as well as on digital layers of locative information, city-image analysis, and participatory experimentation around how one experiences space.
Taien Ng-Chan is a writer, artist, and professor at York University’s Department of Cinema and Media Arts, whose research explores locative media art and interactive cinema. She is Chair of the ICA’s Commission on Art & Cartography, and one half of the artist research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (with artist Donna Akrey).
Connection & Captivation, Sustainability & the Status Quo: Might Musical Maps Move Us?
Music, accompanied by other sensory experiences, can have properties that give a particular pull and immediacy to spaces it evokes. This workshop will investigate music’s unique potential to heighten the impact of maps that explore often emotion-laden issues around environmental and cultural sustainability.
Darren Sears is a San Francisco-based artist-cartographer with a background in landscape architecture; he has a particular interest in describing and heightening the spatial experiences of natural environments. http://www.darrensears.com
AR Doodling Workshop
Seize is an Augmented Reality (AR) doodling game that was originally designed for players to visualize past experiences during the lockdown in Shanghai, China, within the current cityscape. The past bodily experiences are reawakened through the process of AR doodling in the game. We will experience and discuss how the mobile AR game can bring past bodily memories to the present in the urban landscape.
Haoran Chang is a Ph.D. student at York University Cinema and Media Studies. He is also a multimedia artist and researcher focusing on the liminal relationship between the virtual and reality. He is also the founder of the Mixed Reality collective Chameleon Gallery and the lead of two projects published on SteamVR. https://www.haoranchang.com/
Walking as Thinking – a litter(ary) response
This workshop is based on a series of artist’s books, which were created by the artist who walked the same route daily, documenting and then collecting white or black or coloured litter. The collected litter was further documented in the studio. This mapped the walk, through litter, and ‘cleaned’ the route thereby making a small impact on the environment. The workshop will consist of a 15-minute talk and a 45-minute walking re-enactment of the process in Cape Town.
Gordon Froud has been actively involved in the South African and international art world as artist, educator, curator and gallerist for more than 30 years. He graduated with a BA (FA) Hons from the University of Witwatersrand, and a master’s degree from the University of Johannesburg, where he heads the department as a senior lecturer. https://www.art.co.za/gordonfroud/
We packed so much into one day! We had four stimulating presentations about art-based approaches to mapping, and a lively group of participants. It was hands-on and really enriching. Thanks so much to everyone who joined us and helped to make it great! Check out some participant-created maps below.
As part of the Mighty Niagara Film Festival on August 24th, join us for a strata-walk around St. Catharines followed by a rooftop screening at the Niagara Artists Centre!
The participatory mapping exercise, led by researchers Taien Ng-Chan, Lee Rodney, and Donna Akrey, will take its prompts from the mediated history of the region. A walk-book will be provided for participants with creative questions, prompts, and drawing spaces, and the walkshop will loop back to the NAC to conclude with an experimental screening presentation.
The screening is an experimental film developed with the NAC’s historical archives. Spanning from the 1950s-1990s, the Jacobs’ Family home film collection captures the shifting landscape of St. Catharines and the Niagara borderlands through the lens of a local family. Curators Christina Dovolis and Cleo Sallis-Parchet worked with the archive to unravel, digitize, and thread narratives related to the materiality of borders and kinship.
This event is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Niagara Artists Center, Archive/Counter-Archive, University of Windsor, Brock University, York University, IN/TERMINUS, and The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit.
A Sense of Impending Doom: A Strata-walk for Turbulent times
The last few months of social distancing and general uncertainty about the future have generated a new appreciation for collectivity, closeness, and community. As we are separated from each other and travelling is no longer a viable option, how can we find ways to share and connect through a sense of beingness, while remaining in the safety of our own homes?
The Art & Cartography Commission of the International Cartographic Society, in partnership with the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, presented an online “walkshop” in July 2020, as part of the conference Drifting Bodies/Fluent Spaces. The event investigated the act of mapping and situating ourselves, confronting our anxieties, as well as tuning in to what brings us comfort in our own space. The group of 30 participants, located all over the world, connected and sensed each other in unique ways through a series of analog mapping exercises that took place in the virtual space of Zoom. Using simple tools in their vicinity, such as a piece of paper, a camera, and a marker, the participants captured their bodies in space, the sky above their heads, as well as their relationships and emotions to their environment.
Visit the website to view the traces and outcomes of the workshop: https://impendingdoomwalk.wordpress.com/ Watch the video documentation of the full workshop, featuring various perspectives – from the bird’s-eye view of the zoom grid to the close-ups of the personal and intimate moments.
Want to participate? It’s not too late and we hope that the archive will keep growing! Discover new and unique ways to experience mapping the space that surrounds you by following the set of exercises listed on the “Outcomes” page. Send your emotional and sensorial Strata-Map to hamiltonperambulatoryunit@gmail.com.
Drifting bodies/ fluent spaces is an international meeting/conference on walking arts in relation to the liquid bodies that cross the landscape. Focusing on intermedia and embodied practices, the project enables a site-specific creation-research laboratory about the relations between walks and dérives, sounds and silences, void and occupied places, digital and bodily spaces, and their walking narrations and translations.https://walk.lab2pt.net/
Reclaiming Through Mapping: The Olympic Sites of Tokyo
The International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on Art & Cartography organized the Pre-Conference Workshop “Reclaiming through Mapping: Olympic Sites of Tokyo” in July 2019. Some of these spaces, including the main conference venue, are on reclaimed land or artificial islands in Tokyo Bay built out of waste landfill. This workshop investigated the question of how place is constructed and mapped, using an experimental methodology developed by the artist-research collective Hamilton Perambulatory Unit, who led a participatory mapping walk in Tokyo that looks to uncover the layers of urban development history of the 2 Tokyo Olympics and the high-growth (1964) and post-growth (2020) periods they represent. This interdisciplinary workshop used hybrid spatial and sensory ethnography and intermedial approaches to map a site and distinguish the layers of time, history, materiality, and digital city-image. Participants contributed to the final multi-media strata-map of Tokyo’s Olympic sites.
Watch a video documentation shot and edited by Sarah Choi:
To begin this two-day workshop, the participants met at the Tokyo Metropolitan University for short presentations to contextualize the experimental and sensory mapping methodologies, before continuing the discussion on the trains while heading towards the Toyosu fish market for lunch (45min from Akihabara). They then visited the nearby construction site of the Athlete’s Village on Harumi Island while receiving background history on the area, and spent some time mapping the site. On the second day, they met at one of the 1964 Olympic sites to further explore mapping methodologies before heading back to Tokyo Metropolitan University to share results. The data collected helps answer the following research questions:
How does the official Olympic narrative affect the sites?
How do experimental cartographies work to investigate how place is constructed?
Buoyant Cartographies was a workshop co-hosted by the In/Terminus Research Group (Lee Rodney and Michael Darroch), Float School (Justin Langlois and Holly Schmidt), and the HPU, investigating the Detroit River border through strata-mapping and other methodologies. Some of the resulting workshop booklets, maps and videos were exhibited as part of “The Living River Project: Art Water and Possible Worlds” at the Art Gallery of Windsor (curated by Stuart Reid and Patrick Mahon) from October 26, 2018 – January 29, 2019.
Abstract: The Hamilton Perambulatory Unit (HPU)’s strata-mapping framework is an experimental research-creation practice that focuses on how spatial meaning is created through a performative “stratigraphic” sensing and researching of a site. The international border between Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Ontario makes an especially compelling site for experimental cartographies in light of the conflicts over borders and walls in the current political environment. At the southernmost tip of the Great Lakes system, we focused our attention on this river border as a material site and geopolitical space: it enabled us to investigate alternate possibilities for sensing and envisioning the layered and conjoined histories of this fluid space. The Ojibwe name for this location is waawiiatanong ziibi, “where the river bends,” suggesting a radically different spatial imaginary than the divided space that has been established through colonial and national histories. Experimental cartographies can thus help to develop alternate ways of experiencing such sites, an initial step towards decolonizing the spatial imaginary through a project of delinking. In September 2018, we conducted a workshop entitled Buoyant Cartographies, focusing on a performative and intermedial investigation into spatial meanings and their construction on Peche Island, which sits in the middle of the Detroit River. This was one of three Detroit River sites investigated in the workshop, with contributions from workshop organizers and HPU co-conspirator Donna Akrey.
Exhibition
Lee Rodney with Justin Langlois, Buoyant Cartographies: Alternative Mapping Practice on the Detroit River, August 31 – September 1, 2018.
The HPU team gave an introductory talk at the Art Gallery of Hamilton on walking and mapping as a method of creative and social exploration, including a mapmaking session to chart the past, present and future of this very particular site in downtown Hamilton. The findings from this walk were displayed at the AGH as part of Hamilton Now: Objectexhibition, and also contributed to the Stratigraphic City (Hamilton) video installation by Taien Ng-Chan, displayed along new work by Donna Akrey!
HPU Founding member Taien Ng-Chan led a Strata-Walk around the block in conjunction with an experimental site-specific soundtrack that was made in the 48-hours preceding the conference, and presented a paper on locative media practices.
This public walk and talk takes the area around the Workers Arts and Heritage Centre (WAHC), particularly the newly built West Harbour GO Station, and analyzes the social strata that affects this particular place and space. Strata-Walk (WAHC Version) aims to provide participants with strata-mapping skills in order to highlight the different layers of place that make up Hamilton’s fast-changing downtown core.
Please join IN/TERMINUS and the Hamilton Perambulatory Unit for a participatory Strata-Walk in downtown Windsor, as part of the Triennial of Contemporary Art Meet at the Art Gallery of Windsor.
The metaphor that downtowns have a “heart” or “soul” lends emotional weight to the dense historical and cultural layers that define city life. Our collaboration combines stratigraphic cartography with the military practice of reconnaissance, enquiring into the relationship between the historic military presence in Windsor’s urban centre and current locations of its “heart and soul.” Windsor’s Armouries represent a late 19th/early 20th century civic structure that traditionally occupied the “heart” of the city, representing a form of fortification and security that has lost relevance. Starting from the Armouries (soon the University of Windsor’s School of Creative Arts), our participatory “strata walks” map ways in which traditional forms of security and surveillance have shifted, disappeared, or morphed into new contexts.
