Wall Street | the audio walk | by Niklas Tafra
Niklas Tafra is a Swedish artist based in London. Incorporating the ubiquitous technologies of our current modes of consuming sound into the very material of his practice, notably headphones and the MP3 player, he investigates the contemporary relationship of an individual to social and public space.
Wall Street - Audio Walk embeds the rhetoric of capitalist individualism withing the landscape of Manhattan's financial district. Composed as a dynamic digital Hörspiel, an audio composition incorporating text and sound, Wall Street is a sonic play of recorded noise of the urban environment and excerpts from the motion picture based on Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Using the personal space of headphones within the public space of pedestrian traffic, seemingly harmonious subjects, including neo-liberalism, and the virtues of selfishness, become questionable; the collision of the private sonic art experience with the physical environment reveal similarities, contradictions, and differences, of Western ideals of autonomy.
INSTRUCTIONS :
1. CLICK TO DOWNLOAD WALK STREET AUDIO WALK
2. Upload the file to a portable audio player
3. Go to the corner of Wall Street & Broadway, New York City (point A on map above)
4. Put on your headset on and play the mp3 file as you walk Wall street towards the East until reaching the fountain (point B on map).
NOTE : We highly recommend that you restrain yourself from listening to the audio piece prior to being at point A in order to experience the Audio Walk in the best manner.