OA#1. Listening and Mapping the Sonic. Plurality and Wayfaring: Writing the OpenSound Project

Over the course of a two-year European sound project, Opensound.eu, an iterative series of sonic encounters have occurred in seven different countries. The first of these took place in December 2011 on the island of Favignana and subsequently in the city of Palermo. A diverse group participated in four days of workshops, lectures, soundwalks, performances and discussions. A great deal of planned and spontaneous documentation activity could be witnessed, such media capture being commonplace in contemporary society.

This paper and the associated artwork (an experimental web assemblage Opensound Assemblage #1) offers some reflection upon such practice as informed by the proximate fields of anthropology (Ingold 2007), media archaeology (Zielinski 2008) and non-representational geography (Thrift 2007) and proposes some methodological implications derived from the collective strategies that have emerged over the duration of the Opensound project.