Digital Sanctuaries (digitalsanctuaries.com) is a modular mobile app that allows users to experience cityscapes via interactive, site-determined music. It guides them on soundwalks that pass through a city’s layers of time and meaning, allowing users to adjust their sonic experience. Created by the electronic percussion duo Electric Kulintang (2014 TED Senior Fellow Susie Ibarra and Grammy-nominee Roberto Rodriguez),the app incorporates music, spoken word, moving and still images, and innovative interactive design.
More than simply a guided tour, however, Digital Sanctuaries directs listeners’ attention to their environment and encourages creative placemaking, tapping into and reimagining the spirit of a place. The notion that places have their own lives, their own animate being of sorts, exists across cultures. Ibarra and Rodriguez’s musical work has engaged substantively with indigenous rhythms and practices from the Philippines to Cuba, and this has attuned them to the wonderful fertility of peoples’ interaction with natural environments, from the wildest woods to the most human-determined city block.
“Underneath the roots of cities, I’m listening for the natural world,” explains Ibarra. Part of this environment flows from the past—the burial grounds, historically significant sites, major landmarks—and part flows from the overwhelming wave of the technology- and data-saturated present, its people and the quiet, constant presence of nature into human-built spaces.
“Digital Sanctuaries is a process I call ‘connecting to disconnect,’ using technology to lead you into a world of music, nature and beauty amidst the routine of the daily working environment,” Rodriguez notes. “People will have access to this meditative space, where otherwise everything else around them might often be overly saturated with negative information exhausting ones energy from constant multi tasking and stress. With the Digital Sanctuaries music app, the listener finds a place of peace and tranquility.”
Listeners can remix the sounds and music on the app, allowing them to determine their own listening experience and discover different ways of relating to time and place.
Hailing from the contemporary classical, jazz, and pop worlds, neither Ibarra or Rodriguez intended to make an app. Yet their vision for interaction, site-determination, and multimedia experience demanded they connect with the very force that, in some ways, was causing the disruption between people and place. They were encouraged by Andrew Horwitz, founder of Culturebot Media and Arts and former public programs director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, to imagine and create a work intersecting music, art and technology for Lower Manhattan.
“I was very much interested in the idea and possibilities of digital public art,” recalls Ibarra. “Together, we chose the 12 sites enveloped in three routes winding through historic Lower Manhattan, the East River, and the Hudson, and discovered one element that connected the sites was water, its presence no matter where you were downtown.”
As Ibarra and Rodriguez composed music and worked with visual artists, interaction designers, and poets, they came to understand the beauty of the medium. “The app idea felt very accessible. Many people have smart phones or can also listen on their friends or family’s smart phones. It seemed like an instrument that is very inclusive.”
The new medium soon suggested ample variations, modular ways to remap and re-imagine the places and natural elements urban dwellers encounter on a daily basis. They realized they could scale the app, and open it up to new sites and cities. This summer, in addition to a new installment engaging with different sites in New York, Digital Sanctuaries will also create an app for a series of sites in North Pittsburgh, commissioned by the City of Asylum Pittsburgh as part of their 10th anniversary celebration (release celebration August 7-9, 2014).
The City of Asylum Pittsburgh’s mission is to give voice to people and provide sanctuaries for writers in asylum. Digital Sanctuaries, Pittsburgh maps a new garden to garden walk of COAP and integrates historical landmarks and poetry with music. Pittsburgh sites include Sampsonia Way, Widow’s Home, Allegheny Community Gardens, George Ferris House, National Aviary, Alphabet Reading Garden, and Alphabet City with poetry by Richard Wilbur, Toi Derricotte, Osip Mandelstam, Wislawa Szymborska, Dunja Mikhail, Osama Alomar, Muriel Rukeyser, Osip Mandelstam, Susan Stuart, and Willa Cather.
Digital Sanctuaries is currently in discussion with collaborators to create Digital Sanctuaries, Philippines, a multi-city modular app walk for Manila, Davao, Cebu, as well as discussing its potential collaborations in Mumbai, Delhi, Los Angeles, and Sydney. “The idea of creating sanctuaries for places, for cities and for communities is very timely. It has shown Roberto and myself its values and allowed us to create a platform to tell the stories of urban America and many of the great world cities through a modular music app” reflects Ibarra. “It isn’t that apps or soundwalks are ideas that are new or different; it is the rich musical story of cities with sanctuaries that’s timeless, one that connects the past to the present to the future, and lasts. The app walk allows us to be playful with this, in both a live and immersive, virtual experience.”
How to experience Digital Sanctuaries without being onsite:
Open the links to some of the NYC sites below in your smartphone. You should be able to manipulate the app and hear the music, which is normally triggered by GPS, remotely:
1. African Burial Ground
http://digitalsanctuaries.com/ABG/
2. Louise Nevelson Plaza
http://digitalsanctuaries.com/LNP/
3. Battery Park Labyrinth
http://digitalsanctuaries.com/BPL/
4. New York Stock Exchange
http://digitalsanctuaries.com/NYSE/
Additional Info
Talking Gong: Song of the Bird King Encodes and Re-Maps Rhythms, ...
Genius Loci: Digital Sanctuaries App Channels Timeless Resonances and ...
Top of Press Release
