Summer Soundwalk Series: Good City Group with Sam Anthem

Join Good City Group and Sam Anthem for “HEAR HERE: Experimental Listening”, a sound walk in Emmerson (Louis) Park.

Immersing ourselves in the unique soundscape of Emmerson Park, this soundwalk will challenge our traditional habits of spatial and temporal listening. We will use and experiment with recording technology to capture and experience the auditory landscape from different vantage points and moments in time. By listening and re-listening throughout the soundwalk, we will become uniquely intimate with the subtle changes of sound over time; and we will experience our ears leaving our heads in real-time and traveling in the park without the remainder of our bodies. No equipment is necessary; though if possible, please bring headphones and an audio recorder (such as a smartphone).

Meeting location: Southwest corner of the park by the intersection of N Winchester Ave and W Granville Ave.

RSVP by clicking here!

Formed in March 2013, the Good City Group came together around the idea of how the “good city” can inform our roles as civic innovators who care deeply about Chicago’s future. The group was born out of a collective desire for cross-disciplinary, experimental proposals that affect our everyday experiences. We explore inventive, equitable approaches to placemaking, urban design, and environmental justice at the hyper-local scale that can have a big impact for residents. We come from diverse practice areas with a central premise that design professions should be integral collaborators with the community, planners, and policymakers to envision and implement strategies for healthy, resilient cities.

Sam Anthem is an interdisciplinary sound, performance, and media artist who seeks to illuminate, turn upside down, and animate naturalized status quos. Weaving conceptual threads across archives, bodies, species, and sociality, their work addresses knowledge systems and material relationships through sonic, technological, and performative encounters.

In partnership with Night Out In The Parks and the Chicago Park District, our program consists of a series of guided soundwalks, workshops and training sessions that engage multi-generational communities in their own neighborhoods. Participants will listen to and for cultural and natural features of the landscape. Rivers, streets, residential and commercial dwellings, traffic patterns, human and animal sounds all feature in these soundscapes. Are plants tuning in, contributing, or responding to all this sound? How do we listen culturally, collaboratively, and more carefully?