Re-Presencing: A Soundwalk through Jackson Park

Re-Presencing: A Soundwalk through Jackson Park

MSAE Member Practice — Norman W. Long

Norman W. Long has been a longtime board member of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and a sustained contributor to its mission of fostering deep listening as a cultural, ecological, and community-based practice. Over many years, Norman has helped shape MSAE’s programs, partnerships, and public presence while maintaining an active artistic practice rooted in soundwalks, field recording, and collaborative performance. His work reflects a deep engagement with place, history, and social context—values central to MSAE’s approach to acoustic ecology. The following report documents Presencing, a soundwalk led in Chicago’s Jackson Park in August 2025, developed in part through Norman’s artist residency at the Hyde Park Arts Center, where the project was supported and shared as part of his 2024–25 residency.

Re-Presencing was a Jackson Park soundwalk from the Garden of the Phoenix on the Wooded Island to 63rd Street Beach, inspired by the writings of Ida B. Wells. Jackson Park was the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Wells published “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature,” a pamphlet that protested the exclusion of African Americans from the fair, as well as the widespread lynching of Black men and women and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. She also emphasized that the progress of African Americans since emancipation was inseparable from the progress of the United States.

In a prior related event in 2019, Norman presented an earlier iteration of this work as a live mix of field recordings from Jackson Park with vocalist Cher Jey at Experimental Station, as part of Pictures and Sounds’s experimental music showcase. Re-Presencing extended this ongoing artistic inquiry into the soundwalk format, completing the cycle through a collective, site-based listening experience.

At the time of the August 2025 soundwalk, efforts were underway to restore the dune ecology at 63rd Street Beach, along with rehabilitation work on the Wooded Island. Construction of the Obama Presidential Library was also underway on adjacent parkland. Jackson Park and the lakefront have long served as active hubs of recreation and cultural life for surrounding communities.

Norman led participants through a changing soundscape encompassing a diverse range of programmatic, architectural, and ecological spaces across the park. He had previously led soundwalks in Washington Park in 2017 as part of MSAE’s Night Out in the Parks program, and again in 2021 for the Chicago Architectural Biennial in Woodlawn and Jackson Park. This collective walk through the park offered participants an opportunity to reconnect with their environment. Listening together functioned as an act of re-presencing—countering the disconnection produced by social-media algorithms and responding to the absence-ing of Black and Brown bodies through gentrification, anti-Black and anti-immigrant violence, the criminal justice system, and the prison-industrial complex.