Smart Cities Radio Essay 30 March 2021(1)

Les fantômes was created by Maude Lafrance as part of the Feminist Performance Creation & the City project, a collaboration between Imago Theatre and PULSE: 
https://www.imagotheatre.ca
https://www.performativeurbanism.com/feminist-performance-creation-the-c

Creative Director & Dramaturgy: Shauna Janssen
Sound design: Jamie Woollard

Performers:
Micheline Chevrier
Brian Dooley
France Rolland
Anne-Marie Sahed
Natalie Tannous 
Julie Trépanier
Victor Andres Trelles Turgeon

The Feminist Performance Creation & the City research-creation project and is funded by a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council Partnership Engage Grant.

Les Fantomes Final

In the fall of 2019 researchers at Concordia University’s Performative Urbanism Lab (PULSE) undertook a project to engage with acoustic urban ecologies and the ways that sound(s) locate them in space and time. The interdisciplinary research-creation team is made up of artist-researchers with backgrounds in the fields of urbanism, performance, design, architecture, spatial and sound art practices.

The key interlocutor for this project is Gorilla Park, an irregular shaped parcel of land located on a disused railway track, in a Montreal neighbourhood called Marconi-Alexandria, currently a rapidly gentrifying quarter of the city. The uneven development in this part of the city is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies.

The politics of the smart city discourse are deeply entangled with ideas of the ‘right to the city,’ and brings into question: who is the smart city for? What is a smart city? In English the word ‘smart’ goes beyond the generally received definition of modish and intelligent as it relates to current trends towards connectivity and mediated urban environments, generally predicated upon a ‘digital agenda,’ wherein the privileged position of smart and intelligent technologies is being furthered. Through our collaboration and dialogue we have been exploring how performative, scenographic, and sonic understandings of urbanism and urbanity open up intersectional perspectives and inclusive ways for how we experience “intelligent” cities?

Due to the global pandemic, PULSE researchers were forced to collaborate remotely using online teleconferencing platforms, where they began to remix the documentation of their temporary occupation and in-situ exploration of Gorilla Park, which included sampling sound recordings and conversations they shared; problematizing surveillance capitalism and concepts of the visible/ invisible and what sound scholar Brandon Labelle refers to as the ‘overheard’ (2018).

This unfolding and iterative approach to sustaining collaboration has also become a mode to experiment with performative methods of artistic research taking place in contested urban spaces; foregrounding the use of bespoke sound devices and 360˚ video recordings, to situated methods such as walking, and hacking Google Earth imagery.