Public Space as Secret Theatre: Eavesdropping With Locative Audio

Abstract

In this presentation, I will unpack the use of new personal mobile technologies like iPod and iPod Touch for creating new performative experiences of audio walks in public space. I will focus on three related aspects: - the social consequences of overhearing, eavesdropping, or in its more technical, pathological terms, ecouterism (as coined by Elisabeth Weis 2009) on the postmodern listening subject; - the dispossession of the listener in public space; - the end of the postmodern 'individual' listener in a rehabilitated sense of 'community' in the digital age. I wish to demonstrate how the iPod and iPod Touch are, to some extent, remediating intimate aesthetic sound and image experiences of the Sony Walkman, and yet, with the addition of locative technology (such as geo-tagging and geolocation), the theories of managing our urban experiences through mobile music media and personal stereo need to be revised. My approach will be much inspired by Critical Theory and Hosokawa's text on "The Walkman Effect" (1984), which I suggest to update with the above concepts.