Congregation - a sound guided walk and audio composition

Congregation is a word I usually associate with Christianity: the congregation go to the church to celebrate mass. This was a different sort of congregation: a coming together of people carrying metallic balls through the streets of Macau.   

Sound artist, Ray Lee, has created these metallic spheres which have some special properties: they make electronic sounds such as beeps and drones as you walk with them.

A group of about 15 of us were each assigned a ball and told to walk with it and be sensitive to the sounds it produces. As we made our way around the park it did indeed come to life and start humming.  

The sounds were sometimes harmonic and other times abrasive, as if it were indicating which direction it wanted to be carried in. Following the path of greatest harmony was the basic idea, then, and we fanned out following a similar direction but not identical streets.   

There had been heavy rain earlier in the afternoon and the streets were washed clean and less busy than usual. Without knowing exactly where the ball was leading me, I did get a sense all the same that I was progressing on some sort of path. The sounds that the ball produced slowly evolved and became rhythmic.

While we are used to using online mapping software to make our way around the city there is something unusual in being guided by a non-human entity in this way. It is more opaque. There is a moment where you ask yourself whether it really knows where it is taking you, and if knows isn't the right word for a machine, then is competent at this task is perhaps a more precise way of putting it.   

We were lead up winding steps to the old fortress in the centre of the city. Slowly the balls congregated and they produced new sounds. They harmonised with one another and a little extra bass frequency was added with a speaker stationed up there.  

The spheres were then collected and displayed on a set of stands. There was a funny air of this being both an art event and a technical display. It reminded me of the way the two of these used to come together in the fairs of old where new inventions were staged to maximum effect. This is not to belittle the artistic aspect of the work, it comes more from the self-effacing manner of the artist and staff presenting Congregation. The centre of attention was clearly the balls themselves and not the people.

The tour that this produced had to walk a fine line between being challenging enough that it wasn't so simple to complete that it was over before it started, whilst at the same time not being so hard that people lost their way, never finding the destination. You needed to be sensitive to both the ball and your location and let them take you on a magical mystery tour. My sense is, it managed to strike a good mid-point. While the technology required to achieve this isn't completely cutting edge, it is complex enough that it would be easy to get things wrong. This looked like a well-designed system that had been tested in the field and worked smoothly so, as an audience, you didn't have to worry about the technology but could instead relax into the experience.

 

The Immersive Tour of Ancient Egypt: Horizon of Khufu

Immersive tours have become a reality and I guess it's the most likely way I am ever going to stand at the top of the great pyramid of Cairo. Somewhat by chance, I ended up taking this immersive tour of Ancient Egypt while visiting Xi'an, the Chinese city famous for its Terracotta Warriors. Yes I was in an ancient Chinese capital but I was not about to go and see real history, it was the fake sort I was looking for and boy did I get it. 

The tour is a family friendly virtual tour that takes place within a huge warehouse. To drag people in they do have to construct some cat statues and Egyptian style decorations. I guess the kid would be climbing up it and sliding down its back without the barrier in place. Kids don't really need virtual tours: they can find fun in the here and now.

You receive a headset that is clamped on and it does not admit any light from the outside. You are now seeing only what the headset shows you. It is disorienting at first, you cannot fully trust it and imagine you are going to bump into someone or something but with a little time you get used to it. You have to walk through actual space to make the image you are looking at appear as if you are walking through the temple or whichever exotic location it is serving you up with.

I was on a small boat gliding along the Nile and I seem to remember a cat and a tour guide accompanying me too. You don't have to look at them all the time but they are present. There is sound too, flutes and water, the tour guide talking... in Chinese. The sound also seemed to be  stereo so that when you turned your head it's position in the stereo mix changed - this made it seem as if the sound was outside of you and in the space. Nice touch. The visual aspect of the tour was quite complete yet at the same time also somewhat kitsch. It looked like a video game that started out with a big image but which then needed to continually top the last scene and so descended into special effects which broke the spell completely. To get a better sense of the imagery I'd suggest looking at their demo video on their website https://www.excurio.com/en/horizon-of-khufu/ 

This is what the scene looks like in the cold light of day. A group with their headsets on shuffling their way through the black and white empty space. Interestingly, I noticed there is a walking route which the virtual tour follows. Part 1 moves to one area and the group is then navigated to the next scene in another part of the space. This is a touring virtual tour (it can be presented in different cities) so I would imagine the host venue has to be large enough to accommodate this choreography.

When I pulled off my headset to compare the pyramids with the real space I saw before me a mass of geometric patters, black, white and grey. At first I thought these were just street art but having seen how the technology plots the space I now start to wonder if these play a functional role in spatial plotting. It is a distinct design one way or another. I was at this point in the tour more interested in the mechanics because the content had sort of exhausted itself and the form was no longer a novelty.   

What's more, the technology froze at one point and I got a tap on the shoulder from the staff who had to reset the program. The tour sort of works but the tech is not quite seamless yet. This was the most interesting aspect of it, it be honest, as the content was like a run of the mill video game. This is clearly an expensive and cutting edge touristic experience and they need to make their money back. That's why it cannot be too artistic or obscure. These immersive tours will only become more widespread and the technical aspects will surely improve but the concepts, narratives and interactivity all end up being put somewhat aside. If these are to really make a breakthrough they will need to better integrate these issues or else they will remain a novelty item like 3D cinema.

The Japanese Interval Walk

The tours that I tend to write about tend to be about something. That is to say, they have a subject, a route, a way of navigating you along it and something to impart along the way. That's pretty standard. There is, however, another angle I haven't paid so much attention to so far: how to walk. Walking can be understood as an action in its own right and there are a great many people who come at it with different points of interest. Japanese Interval Walking is a case in point. It is enjoying a moment in the spotlight as people are looking into the health benefits it allegedly confers.

It is a form of interval training whereby you mix intensive walking with relaxed walking: you switch between the two every three minutes and keep this up for half an hour. I had recently got myself some new shoes that actually fit me, no mean feat here in Zhuhai, if you pardon the pun. Booted and suited with phone in hand, I tried interval walking in my local neighborhood cutting a course through the park and old town. It was not particularly difficult to do, I practically sped walked a marathon once (OK I ran a bit, too) so this was a much smaller ask. This ease might indeed be part of its appeal: it doesn't place too great a strain on anything. 

What is unique about it is the switching of pace and to do this you need to keep one eye on the clock so you are rarely 100% present in the place itself. The park was simply the container for this activity to happen, chosen mainly for its lack of cars. That makes me wonder about empty spaces and how far the idea of a flat void designed purely for walking could be taken. It might be interesting to go into such a space, if one exists. I tried walking in the desert, once, but that was something else, it turned out to be anything but empty. 

There were a few people out and about when I sped off arms swinging and bum wiggling. I was slightly concerned I might look odd power walking at pace then idling about. They have seen far worse, however, and to be honest I have myself been guilty of far more attention grabbing stunts, so this illogical walk didn't seem to trouble anyone. 

The video that my phone automatically generated clearly shows the changes in pace. It's surprising the amount of detail contained in this and that is a takeaway in itself. I am familiar with people spelling out words and marking shapes through GPS route mapping; this level of animation is the next step. There must be some spin off use for this.

It strikes me that it would be possible to practice interval walking on a treadmill and thus do it on the spot. There must indeed be people who prefer walking on a machine to walking in outdoor space. The interval walk might also be considered a performance in the medical understanding of the term. If I were to have the right equipment to test blood pressure, pulse, weight and so on, I would be able to assess the efficiency of the walk in terms of health criteria such as calories expended or blood pressure change and so on. If I needed to do that, I could see myself doing interval walking regularly but that seems to me an overly narrow frame to place around walking. 

Call me old fashioned but I am happier with finding new reasons, new narratives and new places to walk. New, or should I say, alternative ways of walking might, however, offer ways to achieve some of these so it is still worth paying more attention to how we walk. I remember having come across walking as a means of meditation, of focussing, of letting go or of socializing, for instance. Some research will surely upturn a great many more. 

Make China Great Again Tour

The US has its MAGA movement, lead by their current president, which might be described as playing to a myth of national revival. I'm not interested here to what extent that is hyperbole, I simply want to start by noting how powerful a force it is. Similarly, the UK has its Golden Age that gets endlessly recycled in costume dramas and which, it could be argued, played a role in Brexit and its aftermath: take back control! China has something similar: a two pronged fork with the revival of traditional culture on one side and the championing of innovative industries on the other.

This performance took the form of a short tour from point A to point B: From Huawei to KFC. Conventional wisdom might imagine the journey should be the other way around; you start by copying lower quality foreign goods and finish by manufacturing your own high quality products. That is of course the model. The reality is a little more complicated. You, and I don't simply mean China here, I'm thinking of revivals more generally, you start with your culture and you construct a self-serving version of it that never really was. The final result is often somewhat kitsch, watch any Chinese costume drama or better still time travel drama for in these we truly get the contemporary eye. 

This tour was given quickly so as to avoid interference with security guards. Not that it was breaking any rules in particular, but experience has taught me that ambiguity is not something that security guards deal in and when there is a foreigner involved, it can get complicated. This was a get in get out sort of tour for a small group, delivered without any sort of framing dialogue. None was needed.