April 22, 2006
Sound performance in London
Arphield Recordings
Arphield recordings is a project documenting sound performed with RFID (arphid) technology, the radio frequency identification system used for access control and surveillance. The microchip inside each Oyster card tracks your journeys, beeping every time you enter or exit the tube. Join the mob at the Stockwell tube station for an impromptu sound jam/memorial using your oyster cards. 10 June 2006 at 14pm. Download the arphield Recordings podcast from http://odeo.com/channel/85358 and bring the sounds on a portable music player to experience a mix of live and prerecorded Oyster beeps.
The project started with the idea for an arphid mob, inviting friends to join the artist at a designated tube station for a semi-coreographed sound jam using oyster cards. The main question was ‘when and where’ as a major impediment would always be the heavy security at all the gates. It was decided the artist would do some observation and this would eventually indicate the best timing and location for the arphid mob. Observing the familiar tube’s access control gates, initially with no equipment and later with a video recorder, she realised that people were already engaging in impromptu sound performances. My documentation led me to discern varied patterns and even participatory scores, with mass arphid soundscapes punctuated by silences, glitches and cracks in the system, all warped up in a circadian rhythm of work-rush hours.
The first arphield recordings –documenting the impromptu sound performance of people moving through the London tube access control gates were done in Brixton, Kings Cross and Caledonian Road tube stations during march 2006 for the TAGGED one day event at SPACE Media Arts (NodeLondon March 2006), when cds with the tracks and locational tags were distributed.
The project remains open to contributions. One way of doing this is downloading the arphield recordings and visiting the station gates with the sounds on a portable music player to experience a mix of live and prerecorded oyster beeps. Another way of participating is by contributing arphield recordings from a tube station access control gate. You can do this by opening an odeo.com account and uploading your recordings, tagging them as arphieldRecording followed by the number unique to your oyster card (as in arphieldRecordings-0503266130-03)
The next arphid mob will happen at the Stockwell tube station, South London. Join us for an impromptu sound jam/memorial using our oyster cards, on Portugal day,the 10th of June 2006 at 14pm. Download the arphield Recordings podcast from http://odeo.com/channel/85358 and bring the sounds on a portable music player. Part of Welcome Goodbye Adeus Obrigada, a Portuguese festival of theatre and visual arts at the Blue Elephant Theatre and the Little Portugal.
Posted by luis at April 22, 2006 07:36 AM
