Counter-Mapping with Sounds in the Practices of Postdigital Pedagogy

Abstract

The article analyses the methods of postdigital pedagogy based on critical media design (CMD), and collective practices which involve using sound recording and emission as a tool for counter-mapping the problems associated with the history and politics of digitally mediated urbanism. The article provides a detailed account of, and draws on materials from, the Emotional Urban Weather workshop conducted in 2014, in Warsaw, for an international group of professional young researchers, designers, artists and activists. The workshop took place in specially chosen districts of the Polish capital, in which the participants applied various sound design and critical media design strategies in order to address the historical, social, economic and political problems related to this place. Using technological tools capable of recording, emitting and measuring the parameters of sound, they prepared forms of sound intervention in the city. At the same time, this process became an experimental way of ‘opening up’ the problematics of a place by counter-mapping complex socio-cultural issues. Reflection on the workshop and its outcomes have contributed to the development of a postdigital pedagogy. The practices of critical media design (CDM), when combined with field recordings, affective listening and sound intervention, allow various technologies to be incorporated into theoretical critique and new forms of experimental engagement.

Postdigital Soundscapes: Sonics, Pedagogies, Technologies

“…New pedagogical forms and modes of educational life emerge from listening to the postscript of educational encounters, which necessarily take place in space and often in city or urban spaces (Ford 2019). Krawczak (2022) contribution to this special issue theorizes sonic 'counter-mapping' in Warsaw through aural and postdigital interventions in the production of the urban postdigital soundscape by reflecting on a workshop Krawczak co-conducted with Agnieszka Jelewska titled 'Emotional Urban Weather' to, among other aims, 'design speculative tools for intervening in the overt and hidden infrastructures of the city'. Utilizing sound 'as a medium, a tool, a narrative, a speculation and an intervention… a glitch and a malfunction', workshop participants collaboratively produced alterative sensory engagements with the digital and analogue noises of the city and, by doing so, created a counter-map of the city that let them sense the persistence of the past in the present.…”

“…Workshop participants listened affectively to the city, generating a collective sensory representation of Warsaw's atmosphere, locating various contributing factors to that atmosphere's production, from noise and sunlight to breathing capacities and verbal communication. Focusing on a particular spot, they combined their sensory explorations, experiences, and recordings of the specific space with 'information from publicly available GIS maps that allow open interaction with users' (Krawczak 2022). Merging the above with the historical production of the city's built environment and atmosphere, they produced unauthorized radio stations for drivers and passengers in the area of a roundabout in their selected site, which were signaled by populating the roundabout with people holding antennae.…”