The Time To Get Lost Audio Tour: drifting round Wangfujing

The Time to Get Lost audio tour is an artist's project by Jennie Savage. It is described as "an invitation to people all over the world to get lost simultaneously" and the designated moment for this to happen was 6.30PM on the 3rd October 2014. A list of suggested starting locations was published so people could chose to start their walk in a common location in their city, if they wished, and possibly get lost in company. The other twist is that there were not one but three, presumably different, recordings that could be followed, one titled 'wanderers' and the other two, 'idlers' and 'drifters'. I tried downloading one of these onto my phone but was thrown off by some technical issues which meant I did not manage to get this done on time. Trying again a few days later it worked fine so, even if a little late for the collective event, I  headed off to the suggested meeting point: outside the Beijing Dept Store 北京百货大楼 located on Wangfujing.

I figured that even if I had been here at the appointed hour, the chances of meeting someone else doing this audio walk in Beijing were slim to non-existent and, added to that, I was not sure if the proposed start time was 6.30PM local time or 6.30BST, which would have required me to have started at 1.30AM on October 4th, not a likely prospect, even with the best of will. So a week late, but round about on time, I went to Wangfujing. There was still a relentless flow of people and standing still for a moment I was approached by a not unattractive Chinese woman in a leather jacket who spoke to me in English and came on a bit over-friendly. Having witnessed this routine before, one which typically finishes in a tea scam as China Uncensored amusingly describe, I made an exit, pressed play and pretty much immediately heard a softly spoken woman telling me to turn left.

This quickly brought me into the night market. I've been here once before so knew what to expect: bright and shiny tourist tat China style. The voice on the recording was at times hard to make out as the crowds around me were loud, the C-pop and electronic toys louder still and the vendors the true volume kings. What's more, the recording itself also had background sounds that seemed to shift in and out of focus. At one moment I found myself in a silk store and the next jammed by the crowd beside a stinky tofu stall, and yes the name is well deserved. The woman described some things she could see: workmen eating their lunch and looking around I could see some half parallels in the tourists eating the weird and wonderful snacks from the market, which not only include stinky tofu but go as far as the infamous scorpions on a stick. Passing a small but aggressively amplified Beijing opera stage, I finally squeezed out of the market and could hear the voice clearly.

I was led back onto Wangfujing and where previously I had been noticing the correspondences between the place she was describing and where I was, I now started noticing differences. For example, I cannot imagine seeing large portraits of politicians proudly displayed in the window of a photography shop in, say, Bristol. A picture of Thatcher of Blair in the window there would almost certainly dampen sales and quite probably attract unwanted late-night fast food or even a brick.

Following the instructions proved to be more an art than a science; there was plenty of scope for interpretation. For example, the way the roads and paths were laid out around me did not permit such rapid twists of direction as those being taken in the recording. Faced with impossible instructions or old ones that were superseded by fresh suggestions, choices had to be made. Without ignoring the tour's suggestions I interpreted them in a way that allowed me to be spat out of the shopping area and onto roads behind the shops as a change of atmosphere felt due. Here, removed from the neon and bustle of commerce, other layers of the city presented themselves. Was this a map of the city and its six current ring roads or was somebody making I Ching doodles while on the phone? 

The basic premise of the walk is that you follow the directions given by the woman on the recording as she is walking elsewhere and describing her environment. This elsewhere turns out to be a composite location for whilst I was delving further into one location, the recording seemed to be continually expanding its scope. This basic premise of taking a walk parallel with someone else in another location is familiar. Last year I wrote about A Walk With Amy by Amy Sharrocks which I took in Stuttgart whilst she was on the other end of a phone walking, presumably, in London. In both that work and this the two walkers are paired and the differences and similarities of their observations make up a considerable part of the work's appeal. Where they differ is that Sharroks spoke live, one to one, from a single location whereas Savage's walk is pre-recorded, for multiple users and is not contained within any one real space.   

The audio tour often seemed to be referring to market type places and global business being what it is, it was almost inevitable I would encounter a shopping parallel. This came in the form of H & M. If not them then it would have been an Apple Store, Gap or Starbucks or some other global brand. Ten or twenty years ago that would not have been the case here in Beijing but the city is slowly becoming predictably normal in the sense of having designated shopping areas with global brands. I wonder if the potential walker in Baghdad, one of the other locations proposed, would be more able to escape the reach of McDonalds and KFC? 

I came across a man taking a picture of the city map and for a moment liked to imagine he was on a similar mission to mine, but his lack of headphones precluded him from being on the Time To Get Lost tour. Taking a picture of a map might indeed look like the opposite of trying to get lost but this map, one showing the city's ring roads and sprawling suburbs is all but useless for finding your way locally, such is the scale needed to contain the entire city on a single panel. Added to that, there is no 'you are here', so it really is more an emblem of the city demonstrating its size and showing all the recently conquered lands that make up the new far-lying neighbourhoods.

There were a section of the recording that featured many cars and this had the effect of inducing some nervousness that they might in fact be in my space. That is a real danger in Beijing as the lines between pavement and road can at times be very fluid with pedestrians often having to walk on the roads and cars driving and parking on the pavements. On at least one occasion I had to check behind me in case a car was rushing upon me. This blurring of the sonic spaces was quite pleasing, particularly as it was done by introducing something new into the area rather than doubling up the existing sounds, which is more commonly done on audio tours that appropriate the existing sonic space for the recording.

The recording then seemed to shift to a developing country and talk about shacks and stalls that had solidified into buildings. The closest equivalent I could see were these soft drink stalls doing bubble tea and what not. This shift in the recording from a British environment to a very different one made some sense given the global ambition of the project.

Although Wangfujing is one of the most developed shopping streets in Central Beijing, I almost never come here so it is relatively unfamiliar to me. It was, then, a surprise to stumble in front of the Foreign Languages Bookstore which I remember looking around the first time I came to Beijing in 1997. Back then I came out of it with absurdly cheap propaganda posters of Mao, Marx and Stalin as well as some translated Chinese literature. Not having seen the place in 17 years it seemed at first glance peculiarly similar, a Communist era time capsule surrounded by malls and tourist markets. This interruption of the tour with a strong personal memory span me off on another tangent while I was being urged to turn left by the insistent voice.

I was brought finally into one of the malls and went up an escalator. In my own Waylosing in Beijing Tour, which I took earlier this year, I found myself similarly putting aside my visceral dislike of malls and trying to get lost in one. The problem with using them for this purpose is that they are usually designed with these central atriums that help you find your bearings and the best that can generally be hoped for is to exit the mall into an unfamiliar space. 

I consciously avoided making any selfie pictures on this audio tour but when I arrived at a mirror it was clearly the moment to place myself in the frame. Looking at this picture of myself now, I am prompted to ask, 'what was I really doing there? What was I looking for?' Without getting too introspective about it, I think I was looking for a disorienting experience which might lead me to some unexpected locations and possibly new realisations. As such, I was bringing my own ideas about the value of getting lost and I rather think this audio tour was doing something else. With it only being 30 minutes in length and taking a circuitous path, it did not cover much ground and was never going to seriously disorient me. When leading a Waylosing tour in Birmingham this year, it took us four and a half hours of dedicated action to reach a location entirely unfamiliar to us all and to sense we were more or less lost. The Time to Get Lost Tour was instead for me an experiment in parallel indeterminate spaces that might result in a little disorientation. Taken that way the experiment worked.

The places I was moving through seemed in general a good deal richer and busier than the locations of the recording. This did not entirely surprise me given the neighbourhood.

The recording did not have a strong narrative line to it, it simply seemed to be about movement through different spaces which, at a certain point and without any climax, came to an end. My final location was this street. I don't know how the other two audio tours would have been different, maybe they would have brought me into more contact with people or to other places, I will never know. Knowing there was potential for the experience to have followed other lines is pleasing in a way, but I have to think back to Auto-theatre an experimental audio tour I made with a three way multiple choice of routes back in 2008. Knowing that this work already contained a healthy does of inherent indeterminacy in terms of which way the listener should walk, I now ask myself whether compounding that with two alternative tours was really necessary. With regards this Time To Get Lost Tour, I will of course never know the scope of the full work. If you are interested to know more about the walk there is an interview with Jenny Savage on Talking Walking in which she goes into the process of creating the walk and some of its intentions. It makes for interesting listening, whether sitting or walking. It is definitely a worthwhile experiment and fun to take, even if the name is a little misleading. I should not be surprised to find myself getting lost again with Savage in the future.

The Waylosing Tour

The meeting location for the Waylosing Tour was Birmingham New Street Signal Box which, handily enough, is not located on New Street at all, but is instead round the corner on Navigation Street. What's more, the sign marking this brutalist classic is located in a position facing the train line and is only visible from the street when seen above a wall in a few locations, none of which are actually on Navigation Street itself. This made it a familiar yet mysterious building in the very heart of the city and a prefect place to begin.

It had been raining all morning and the afternoon tour looked like it would be a wet and lonely one. Come 1PM, however, most of the people who had reserved showed up, ready for 5 hours of getting lost on the Birmingham streets in the rain. This was a hardy bunch. We began by establishing which areas of the city we knew best. The general consensus was that the South, West, and centre were the most familiar parts of the city, though there were some hardened urban explorers amongst us who had made it their business to see all points of the compass. While it would be easy enough for me to get lost in Birmingham as I don't know the city, showing this group something none had seen before was going to be a challenge.

With the East as our direction of choice, we set off into the drizzle which obligingly cleared in minutes to leave a mostly bright afternoon. A rhythm established itself whereby we'd walk a few hundred metres, sometimes a few hundred more, stop, look at our new location and consider the choices we had ahead of us.

When we stopped at intersections to discuss the respective waylosing merits of the different paths ahead, we also looked for things that could act as signs. This one for a solicitor is quite literally a sign, albeit one that was placed upside down. As often as not, a building, colour or object could do equally well as our waylosing sign. I like this business plate very much because it is a sign that poses more questions than it answers. Another early find was the sign 'Ask Italian' which was simply the name of a restaurant which sat beside one of the forks ahead of us. These simple observations were allowed to be what they were, i.e. they didn't have to be immediately smart or significant, but every now and then I'd bring previous ones back by mentioning them in case they could help us develop a narrative around the tour as it unfolded. 

These cones looked for the world like clues too. What they were pointing to or what underwater geography they marked was unclear but that did not stop them being signs all the same. A walk unfolds in time as well as space so there is always a going to be some element of narrative, but when we deliberately lay our mental traces as we go, this capacity to see it as a journey with a theme and logic of its own is greatly enhanced. When I made my trial waylosing tour in the city some 3 or 4 weeks ago, the walk came to its conclusion at the Ulysses Kebab Shop. Even though I don't eat meat, I was happy with the reference to both The Odyssey and Joyce as that rounded the walk off very nicely. I was hoping today's walk would start to make sense a bit earlier and not only come together at the end but I also wanted to genuinely work with what we saw and not impose a pre-determined meaning upon it. This meant we had to be patient and trust it would become clearer the more lost we got. It sort of did. 

At the same time as thinking about a story or theme to the tour there remained the very practical task of losing our way. One technique that was helpful was to switch levels from street to canal and back to street again. The canal is great as it has a different navigational logic to the street, what's more, you don't always see the surrounding roads when you are on this lower level so you can cut through otherwise easy to understand routes. You can only have so much of a good thing, however, as canals can also become predictable after a while as they are usually quite straight. 

We walked some real distance and the group was fine with this with no moaners. When trying to get lost distance matters. Thoreau's notion of a 10 mile radius from your home being a suitable distance for an afternoon's walk and at the same time corresponding to the area you can survey in a lifetime and still always find something unfamiliar, came to mind. That requires a conscious search for the fuzzy areas of the mental map and while we began with this idea which propelled us East, we then went through a number of other techniques to help us stumble upon the unknown. If I can imagine two different approaches to way losing I can see one as the search for the North West Passage whereby you have a known start and end point and try to connect them through unfamiliar territory, whereas a second model is to head off into the uncharted periphery with no defined destination. We were more the latter sort of explorers today, though we did have an end point of sorts: I had said we'd aim to be back in the city centre by 6. 

The ambient foods on this sign is what caught my attention. Not being in the catering business I immediately imagined it as food to munch on or suck discretely through a straw whilst listening to Brian Eno albums. We simply had to take a look inside. 

Instead of the large warehouse I was expecting, the doors opened into a single, modestly sized room with a man and a woman sitting behind a glass counter at the far end. Two freezers displayed some non-ambient weekly offers such as this 10-kilo pack of frozen squid tubes. Good value though they were, I regarded them more as an art installation than as serious foodstuffs. 

They had a remarkably good and inexpensive coffee machine so, with espressos in hand, we used the space as if it were a cafe rather than the order room of a warehouse. The staff were bemused but tolerant about us getting lost and finding them.

This alarming sign popped out though thankfully none of us were pulled over and strip searched for concealed squid tubes.

Refreshed and back on the road again we had managed to more or less lose sight of the landmark BT Tower that tethered us to the city-centre but, having made great efforts to remove that landmark, another replaced it in the form of these gas storage tanks.

We came to a large Chinese supermarket and restaurant which we entered as it was time for some refreshment. As we were no longer in the city centre and they had ample space they were fine with us just drinking tea in a way that would not be the case in Chinatown where a meal would have been required. I remember talking about the significance of the compass to Chinese cities and people's sense of orientation. It seems to me that in the UK we are less aware of this as the cities rarely follow grids but instead twist and snake according to the contours of the land with little unified order.

We walked some more and just as we arrived at Spaghetti Junction and looked all set to explore the nation's most iconic car structure as pedestrians, we changed track and dived into a bus. While the junction was no doubt impressive, it was also familiar to several of the group and exploring it would really be the work of a different sort of tour. I also thought about the sign we had seen earlier and made sense of at least one of them: 'Ask Italian' = Spaghetti Junction. On the bus we settled at the top and I asked the group to close their eyes.

Closing the eyes was strangely addictive. I had thought I'd keep mine open so I could oversee the situation and maybe take a picture of this decidedly odd looking group. Once I had closed them however, I found that it became quite compelling and instead started talking about what we could sense and where we might be passing through. In spy movies you see scenes of blindfolded men in the backs of cars being driven round cities to secret destinations; this was a budget version in which we made do with a West Midlands Bus day ticket. We came to a halt after some minutes and I was not sure if we were at the terminus or were taking a long stop. We waited till finally it was clear we were not moving and reluctantly opened our eyes and descended. The bus driver could not work us out at all.  

From there we crossed a park and entered a housing estate and finally were getting properly lost with no clear sense of where we were or how it connected to where we had come from. A large guard dog jumped at me from behind a fence, its bark and bite both scary but thankfully separated from me by metal mesh. While this would not have had such impact elsewhere, having the dog jump out at me once we had entered the lost zone made it more of a shock. I didn't know what sort of place we were in, how exactly to get out of there or indeed what precisely to expect. I won't exaggerate and say I was in a state of fear, but my emotional reaction was stronger as I certainly was that little bit less in control. We then stumbled upon this graffiti 'Hi bill'. I posed for the picture but as you can see, I was uncomfortable, expecting another vicious dog to launch itself at me from behind the black door on the right that bears a 'beware of the dog' sign.  

From the dog estate I then saw what looked like an informal entrance to a green space. We entered and found this semi-desolate location, the site of former construction that had been raised to the ground. I do not deliberately seek such places in the way some urban explorers do, but I do value them all the same as their official neglect permits all manner of unofficial activities to coexist making them paradoxically rich and diverse spaces. 

We saw a steady trickle of people passing through here, mostly young men on their way somewhere else. We, however, were occupying this space: this was our destination. As it was now 5.15PM and I sensed this would be the point in the day when we would be the most lost, it made sense to savour its character. I understand that Birmingham is quite rich in such spaces and this makes me wonder if this experiment were repeated would it be to a similar sort of location that we would be led or would the dynamics of the group lead us somewhere very different?

And here is a group photo of the merry waylosers from Birmingham basking in the warm sunlight. I was lucky to be accompanied by such a great group on this experiment as everybody was very easy to talk to and curious about the urban environment. I think we had pretty much all got talking to one another at some point in the 4 or 5 hours and those conversations make up an essential part of the experience transforming something that was a curious proposition into a genuinely fun afternoon out. It all had to come to an end however, and from here we switched mode from waylosing to wayfinding. We quickly found a bus back into the city centre, a ride which retraced our steps uncannily well. From an elevated position on the top deck of the bus it gave us an overview of the route we had taken and allowed us to review the day's adventure in 10 minutes flat.

We were swiftly delivered to The Woodsman where we drank some well deserved beer. We stayed for a long time (several hours) unpacking the experience and more generally unwinding. Thank you Still Walking and thank you Birmingham for entertaining this notion. It gives me an appetite to go further into waylosing and perhaps even expand the frame of it so that it could take in a whole weekend and take place in a foreign city, which would of course greatly aid getting lost. These are all ideas to turn over and develop at a later date but one thing I am quite sure of is that there will more tours like this in the future, though they will of course be quite different too, as they are all steps into the unknown.  

What is the waylosing tour?

The idea of leading a waylosing walk may sound a little perverse but it's not just a joke for it comes from the solid principle that if you never go out of your way you never discover new places. I'm aware the terms ‘losing your way’ or ‘being lost’ have negative connotations, they sound like a problem, like a lack of something, but these states almost never exist in an absolute form, we almost always have some idea of where we are: which country, city and neighbourhood we're in. Even Christopher Columbus landing on and ‘discovering’ the the Americas, which he mistook for Japan and China, was not completely lost. He knew he was five weeks sail west of Europe.

I’m not planning anything quite so ambitious as that for the voyage on the 2^nd August in Birmingham with Still Walking. More modestly, I’d like to share some techniques and ideas which I use to put myself off my habitual tracks. This walk will, therefore, not follow a predefined route that pushes us ever further into obscurity, the route will instead be decided in the moment depending on who is taking the walk, which areas we are unfamiliar with and what we find. In this way it will be about the process of waylosing, the decisions we have to make and how we can make sense of the journey. Since most of us on the walk will know the city to a greater or lesser extent, chances are we will not be well and truly lost, but we might well come across a few unfamiliar streets, talk about what we find, what it means to not know where you are and not know where you are going. 

I'm excited that this walk has been paired with a wayfinding walk as I see the two of them as dealing with very similar issues. I did some waylosing experiments in Beijing recently, as it is easier to get lost in a foreign country, and I found I had to think a lot about how we navigate and find our way. It was necessary, for example, to choose the right area to get lost in, to locate landmarks in order to lose them and to keep a detailed mental map in order to know when it had been irreparably mangled. Like the unruly younger sibling then, this waylosing walk is cut from a similar cloth but attempts to know the rules only in order to break them.

Finally, on a practical note, the walk is going to take some time and we will try to include a stop for light refreshment on the way, though obviously that depends on where we end up. There will be quite a bit of walking involved, so dress appropriately, and the plan is to find our way back into Birmingham City Centre by 6PM at the latest. You can bring phones but using their map function is absolutely forbidden!