You Are Hear (2014)

You Are Hear is the result of our collaboration with artist Alessandro Sambini during Urban Symphonies, an artist-in-residence programme organized by Exposed Project  with the support by Careof DOCVA and Filmaker.
From March until September 2014 the selected artists had to work on the relationship between video and sound as tools for the analysis of a urban context.

The core of You Are Hear is the ubiquity of cartography and diagrams as tools for conquering/exploiting space, culture, ideas and time. Through the deconstruction of video and audio mathematical representations, we created an algorithm to translate sound recordings into 3d models of abstract landscapes. There were three ideas at the core of the project:
1) Abstract representation of landscape plays a fundamental role in economical development and it epitomizes a typical Western idea of pure vision, a disembodied eye detached from everything;
2) Diagrams can be used to act without any concern for consequences, as shown by the curious story of Route 181 in Israel. You could feel the same in Milan the months before the opening of EXPO 2015: the approach of a huge meteor which couldn’t affect the city. A massive amusement park;
3) Cartography is useful for monitoring infrastructures. A city plan is an overview of a machine, each component of which has been nominated. If you look at street names in a city, their order creates new geographies (especially when street names coincide with names of real places).

Our attempt to keep the three concepts together consisted of soundscapes maps. A soundscape is a singular space,existing only for the time you hear it. We selected different places the name of which should be the name of a geographic location (i.e. Ischia pizzeria, Anatolia Kebab…). Each record was then translated into 3d models which actually looked like landscapes. Finally, according to the standards of international cartography, we added details.
During the exhibition held at Fabbrica del Vapore in December 2014, the maps were available for free.