Sony Walkman

This research paper is presented by Mel Dixon to the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in the field of Visual Art at The Victorian College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne.

Supervisor: Dr Kate Daw
Date: October 2018

With the proliferation of the iPod and related audio mobile technologies in our daily experiences, Shuhei Hosokawa’s “The Walkman Effect” (1984) gains new significance. While exploring the locative aspects of these technologies for media art, I elaborate on Hosokawa’s idea of a “secret theatre” by paralleling it to some compelling concepts in audio (culture) studies, such as Michael Bull’s “auditized looking,” Elisabeth Weis’ “écouterism,” Denis Hollier/Jean Paul Sartre’s “auditory gaze,” and Steven Connor’s “modern auditory I.” As case studies, I focus on three performative audio walks that all took place in train stations around 2012-2013: Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof, Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland, and Judith Hoffland’s Like Me. Each in their own right reconfigures the urban experience by means of locative features and interactive relations with their environments. These art works help to see Hosokawa’s “secret theatre” in a new light of highly individualized yet relational aesthetic experiences that open our ears and eyes to an outside social context and reality rather than shut them off.

Am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts fungieren MP3-Player, Handy oder Laptop als stete Begleiter des Menschen. Jedoch fanden bereits zuvor zahlreiche elektronische Geräte als »Portables« ihren mobilen Platz in Transport- und Kleidungstaschen oder direkt am Körper. Ihr ortsunabhängiger Gebrauch veränderte Vorstellungen von »privat« und »öffentlich«, von Körper, Technik und Identität. Anhand der Produktkultur und Aneignungsgeschichte von Kofferradio, Kassettenrekorder und Walkman sowie dem Handy analysiert dieses Buch die mit Portables eingeübten neuen Formen des Technikgebrauchs, des sozialen Miteinanders und der Mobilität und stellt damit die aktuelle Debatte um eine »mobile Revolution« erstmals in eine historische Perspektive.

Link:
http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-89942-871-1/das-versprechen-mobiler-freiheit

ToC and Chapter 1:
http://www.transcript-verlag.de/media/pdf/567957035147de11915a31f00f20375a.pdf

This presentation aims at rereading Shuhei Hosakawa’s influential essay, ‘The Walkman Effect’ (1984), in which he describes the influence of the Walkman (or as Michael Bull proposed, the ‘personal stereo’) on the relationship between the individual, ‘self-enclosed’ listener and urban space, in its construction of a ‘secret theatre’. With the rise of personal stereo users in public spaces through the introduction of iPod and other mp3-players, including mobile apps, on the market since the beginning of the 2000s, the effects of these secret theatres for the ears to our listening modes and spatial relations have been subject to many artists, among which Janet Cardiff has been perhaps the most researched since the end of the 1990s.

The presentation focuses on new works with smartphones, iPods and mp3-players, such as Dries Verhoeven’s Niemandsland (2012) or Judith Hofland’s Like me (2013), which particularly highlight individual experiences of the self in relation to a new sense of sociability that materializes into real-time urban encounters with places and people. Different from traditional audio-guided walking tours à la Cardiff, these audio theatre pieces turn the privacy of the highly-individual experience of the secret theatre into a feeling of submission to a technology, a network, a system, a bodiless or disembodied voice.

Pieter Verstraete expands on the voyeuristic desires of the ear (‘ecouterism’) in these audio walks until the proverbial ‘acousmatic’ curtain drops down and reveals the theatricality of the final cut, its investment in the imagination’s deceptively homogenising workings of the listening act, as well as the drama of the listener’s own dissociation, dispossession and difference. Verstraete regards the latter as one of the fundamental human experiences of listening that produces the (modern) self but that also allows us to see ourselves in relation to sounding/listening others in new social contexts. As such, these performances with new locative personal stereos help to debunk some of the myths of Hosakawa’s secret theatre of the 1980s and see them in a new light of collective, relational experiences that open our ears and eyes rather than shut them off.