Penny Duff – Sounding the Infra-ordinary: Gowanus

Attesting to the acoustic environment’s essential role in the constitution of physical, social, and existential space, the art of phonography (“sound writing”) captures sound’s unique capacity to document the complex network of encounters that define our experience of the world. Sounding the Infra-ordinary: Gowanus explores how acts of “sound writing”—considered here primarily as experimental writing practices—may be used to develop an ethics of listening that reconsiders the sonic experience. Workshop participants attempted to literarily mediate the acoustic environment via short, plainly descriptive methods adapted from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces during a soundwalk/ramble along Gowanus Canal. The result of this collective endeavor, the documentation is superimposed over a graphic rendering of the canal.