“Virtual Wall” is an augmented audio reality artwork proposed for the Mitte in Berlin. The project will trace the physical course of the (now absent) Berlin Wall and will inhabit the (few) remaining vacant spaces and the (predominantly) re-built areas of the city centre with a complex location sensitive soundscape formed from a mixture of historical material (oral histories and public speeches for example) with fictional audio narratives, music and ambient effects.
Beyond the historical stereotypes of a politically divided culture and the symbolic separation of the capitol the creation of a divided Berlin was essentially the division of people and families generating a massive social disruption (piled upon an already traumatised city). So in a sense, we have two Berlins - the personal and social Berlin - and the public, Propaganda Berlin, eventually these two became hopelessly confused.
The “Virtual Wall” will operate in the space between the public and private lives - balancing material from public broadcast sources with intimate stories and characters. The soundscape will draw heavily upon accurate oral-history material that will be interwoven with strands of a more poetic nature, drawing in musical and ambient sonic material.
This proposal places a strong emphasis on a highly imaginative and creative approach to sound composition and sound design in order to highlight the potential of this emergent field of geo-spatially located virtual audio. Unlike conventional sound-design or musical composition, geo-spatially located audio needs to be highly sensitive to its environmental and architectural context as well as to the fundamentally non-linear manner in which the auditor may interact with the content via the position, speed and heading of the auditor in relation to the architectural/urban environment.
Conceptually and sonically, the principal challenge of the proposal is to develop a ‘compositional’ strategy able to deliver a non-linear but coherent ‘field’ of audio. The system will provide the possibility for both (apparently) fixed and mobile audio events, as well as several mechanisms for sequencing sound files in a variety of ways.
Another significant conceptual challenge will be to re-conceptualise sonic events in the mould of a topology, thus escaping the view of the world (and of sound composition) which is ‘object’ oriented ~ but rather moving towards one which is relational and inextricably connected – both through both spatial and temporal axes.
Throughout the project development special attention will be paid to local narratives, oral histories, and spatial and architectural ‘keynote’ elements of the soundscape. Narrative themes will be developed form historical and cultural research and we anticipate forming partnerships to undertake both the background research and for the generation and composition of content (recorded as multi-lingual voice narratives).
As an element of our on-going development we are experimenting with server based digital storyboarding and soundscape compositional techniques and anticipate that the majority of the project development will be conducted in this manner, facilitating collaborative work from remote locations.
The construction and the experience of our project will occur within both a time domain and a spatial domain. Whilst the experience of audio is by nature temporal and to a degree linear, the experience of a spatially constructed soundscape is totally unpredictable and incorporates many features of non-linear systems. The content of the work itself will address both historical and contemporary time periods adding further levels of temporal complexity.
We may, for example, take in the pre-wall events of the blockade of Berlin that resulted in the Berlin Airlift. There are also four significant stages of Wall construction and modification that range from 1961 until 1975. The wall structure itself provides a focus around the checkpoints that are a source of narrative events, of escape attempts etc. And of course, the Grand Finale - the Wall Opening and it’s subsequent destruction – and of course we may choose to ‘tag’ our project to one of the few remaining sections of wall.
Although the work is spatially bounded (albeit in a large area some 4,000 metres by 400 metres) and has a principal vector in the path of the wall, the compositional structure does not impose a spatial hierarchy or even propose an explicit spatial structure. Spatio-temporal complexity is generated by both the pace of walking through the physical landscape (and ipso facto through the soundscape) in combination with the temporal duration of individual sound events and their position which may be fixed in absolute space, coupled to a trajectory or positioned relative to the participants position.
One of the principal challenges is to decide how to compose or layer material from different historical phases of the Wall – should they be arranged spatially, or should they be cued via a temporal mechanism? Should they be accessed in a chronological order ~ or should there be a fluid mechanism which collides temporal frames of reference?
“Virtual Wall” proposes a range of complex technological challenges. Our proposed project area is a 4Km section of the wall running either side of the new Parliament building and thus needs to incorporate a huge amount of audio data, distributed over a large geographical area (1, 600, 000 square metres).
Creatively the project will develop compositional techniques for managing the admixture of oral histories and fictional narratives associated with the histories of these locations, but will also need to address the pragmatics of cueing and guiding the users over a large geographical terrain, and focussing the participant on the path of the vanished wall (a sharply defined linear track). Naturally there are only certain ‘natural’ limits to where a participant can walk (e.g. the river) and many competing points of interest that will be beyond the scope of our project, therefore compositional and psychoacoustic designs need to be developed to indicate the project boundaries and retain the auditor’s interest and concentration.
Issues of location will probably be solved by the new generation of “Pseudolite” ~ highly accurate ground-based GPS emitters which can give a centimetre accuracy. We intend to employ Wireless LAN technology to supply the vast amount of audio data required by the geographical size of the project, and to supply tracking information for individual participants to facilitate a level of ‘customisation’ for each audio experience (dependant upon the track and sites visited by each participant).
There is further scope in this project to consider the incorporation of visual (screen based) components in the form of detailed map graphics and visual documents geo-spatially linked to specific locations as well as other forms of historical and /or educational information.
GPS, photographic and audio records of
sites along the path of the Berlin Wall
Ambisonic field recording, with GPS location
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