OpenCity

OpenCity is an ongoing project of artistic research that applies methodologies of site and sound walking to interrogate our experience of change, in particular in relation to city life. Past urban walks have taken their thematic cues from each city’s distinctive concerns, such as Stoke-on-Trent’s post - industrial heritage or Berlin’s gentrification. OpenCity’s application of sound walking provokes critique through the disruption of the quotidian and by engendering a prolonged encounter with aspec ts of the city that might otherwise remain overlooked. During OpenCity sound walks a group is typically led on a predetermined route by the artist, each participant provided with an Ipod loaded with a soundtrack comprised of sounds recorded in situ and els ewhere. These contrapuntal sounds are interwoven with what can be heard in the here and now to heighten the experience of moving through a city. An important aspect of OpenCity’s methodology lies in working with inhabitants of the cities in which the proje ct is located, each sound walk generating a palimpsest of associations and recorded material, captured by and reflecting the diversity of perspectives among the group. In this brief paper I shall use the sound walk OpenCity Aix, performed at the Mobile Aud io Fest, November 2015, to reflect upon the French city’s urbanism and that of visionary artist Victor Vasarely, whose Foundation, built on the periphery of Aix in 1976, comprised the endpoint of the walk