Thoughts on Tactical Sound Gardens

Yesterday I slipped upstairs to attend a Digital+Media talk by Mark Shepard about his project Tactical Sound Garden [TSG] Tool Kit.

Overall I left the talk feeling as though the project falls short of its potential as a sonic intervention into urban spaces. Installing these gardens at international new media festivals seems to stymie the opportunities for sustained engagement by a community of users. The "drop and run" nature of installing these sites also limits Shepard's ability to observe how people are interacting with the space beyond what he can glean from the data logs.

What, for example, might he observe if he was able to put together a class at the University of New York Buffalo (where he has already installed a garden) that specifically looked at the new kinds of play that emerge once people get over the novelty of the tool and begin to landscape the site with greater intention? How might people employ the garden as a site for communicating with one another, sharing information about upcoming events, spreading gossip, diverting traffic, etc.

So while, for me, the project didn't push itself quite far enough on an experiential level, on a conceptual level his thinking echoes many of the questions raised by the projects supported by the Office of Public Engagement (which is terribly exciting!)

Here are some of those questions:

If space is something that people produce together such that it takes on highly charged social and political resonances, then what are the ways in which these new spatial conditions can present new kinds of social practice?

How can sound be used in order to break through the hypervisual context of our cities?

What are the differences between strategic and tactical approaches to problem-solving in the artistic but also organizational realm? (his distinction was great - strategy takes an overview perspective that relies on distance, creating grand claims that he called the "zenith of arrogance" while tactics can't be separated from the object but instead are a temporal seizing of the other...like a parasite, tactics depend on a relationship with their host question/problem)

How can community be built around a particular practice (in this case, sound artists who came together to build the sound files that were used for the Zurich version of the sound garden) rather than, in the new-genre public art model, assuming or adopting a particular, but possibly fictitious community to work with?

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One thing I have been appreciating about being at RISD is the discovery that interrelated conversations are taking place in any number of departments on campus. Our office's challenge is how to be increasingly aware of these intersections and how to connect the people who are asking similar questions of their own practice. To do so requires on our part a willingness to step out of our intellectual and creative comfort areas and into new zones of learning. So note to self: get out more often - it will aid our work on both personal and professional levels.