A wrinkle in time, a City of Forking Paths

The City of Forking Paths. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.  Audio/video walk.  Commissioned by the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) as a City of Sydney legacy artwork as part of the City Art Collection.

So this is how it goes.

You are at Customs House, down at Circular Quay, at dusk, or shortly after. You must be there, at Customs House, at dusk, or shortly after, otherwise the whole thing won’t work.

Janet Cardiff has been here, at Customs House, before, and you are now using your smartphone to see what she has filmed for you to see. What she saw, what you see through the camera view of your smartphone, is quite a lot like what you see, although what she saw was different, too, because it was at another time, though not another space. So different people were milling about in the foyer, they were peering down at the giant model of the city sunken below the surface of the glass floor, pretty much like people now are doing. The model, quite a spectacle, is always itself intriguing and slightly unnerving, with or without a smartphone to look at it through. Janet thinks so too.

Janet is talking to you, she has constructed a soundscape for you to listen to while you follow the journey she has made from this point, around dusk or slighly afterwards, into a city of forking paths. Janet wants you to turn around, to walk towards the building exit, paying particular attention to a man in a dark jacket, leaning by a column, who she saw and she filmed when she was here, before you were here, she wants you to look at the same column and see where the man who is no longer there was standing.

She takes you outside, to the steps of Customs House where a great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles will always be there to greet and confound you. The great wide expanse of grey windswept tiles confounded her too, when she was here. You are now standing on the steps of Customs House, holding a smartphone up and looking through it as though about to take a photo, with headphones on.

The soundscape you are listening to features Janet’s voice, but also the sounds of the space you’re in, when she was here, which she recorded binaurally, in order to sound life-like. A crowd of kids passed Janet by when she stood here, surveying the expanse, they pass you by, too, aurally that is, from the top right of your vision to behind your right shoulder. You can hear them so clearly, and the life-like sounds of these chatterers passing makes you want to swivel around and catch them. But of course they’re not there.

Janet plays these tricks for you. She uses the gaps in time between her being here and you being here to knock at the surfaces of what we see, loosening the tightness of reality into something that might be recomposed just a little. Is it time, or space, that she’s unravelling? A bit of both, perhaps.

This is her art of ‘physical film’ making: using the space of the city, your passage through it, as filmic substance. This is different to making a film about a city, about a place, about a person; her medium is the physical inhabiting of a place as filmic substance. The trick here is that what is mostly making this film is not so much what we see but what we hear. It is the sound that sculpts our physical film, just as a film soundtrack will always establish the dramatic pretext of a visual narrative.

Janet conjures from this space here a performance. What could be? Rollerbladers spinning in action, street musicians, perhaps? Let’s see them. They come, they go. Edits in the filming are not smooth. Time and its possibilities are sliced up, orthogonal. Your intimate space is part of this too: a man is seen approaching, he comes a bit too close, he is close to your field of view now, his voice is close to you. It is time to move on. Janet tells you it is time to move on, to follow her steps, keeping the view you see through your camera view matched as much as possible to your own position.

You wander slowly, stiltedly, like a person idiotically trying to walk with a smartphone held up in front of their face, towards Circular Quay, now amongst the flocks of people going about their business at dusk, or slightly afterwards.

You have Janet telling you she’s an artist, she’s alone here in this city, she tells you she’s always an artist alone in a city, somewhere, trying to find some place to eat. She sounds lonely, a bit bored too. She’s seeing tourists here, this is a tourist place, she’s wondering about the networks of travel and mobility that could be mapped here, lines of flight fanning out from this point to many myriad destinations across the globe.

Talking to you, she’s your fellow traveller, we’re both here together, we can share this space, this space fractured by time but knitted back together as filmic space. We encounter the man again: he is the antagonist she created for this physical-film, he is speaking to us now about multiple realities, the multiverse, he asks what if all this was only one sliver of reality? What if there were many more?

We are now becoming the trick. The time in which we’re standing here, at Circular Quay, slightly after dusk, watching this man, through the camera view of our smartphone, listening to Janet tell us to walk to the harbour master’s steps, we’re only one of these slivers of time, too, with no greater claim to know this space than any other of these characters, past or present.

We are standing at the very place where Europeans first settled in Australia. Janet tells us this. The harbour master’s stairs, so different in scale to the ferry docks, the city skyline behind us, feel like a trace from this other time of early settlement. She takes us down the stairs, the stairs are covered in water from the harbour. Is this allowed? Can we get wet feet? She takes us down to the bottom of the stairs, so we stand below the promenade. We can’t see him, but we can hear behind us the man we encountered before getting agitated now, then suddenly somehow Janet has fallen in to the harbour, he has likely pushed her, for a second, in our camera view, there is only water, a view back up to the Quay, to where we are standing. She quickly recovers, it seems, and we are asked to move on.

And so there is real drama in this city-film, but only a little. The falling-in incident goes unremarked upon for the rest of the walk. We are led into the Rocks, taken down some of the more enchanting little streets and alleys one can encounter in this oldest part of Sydney town. Janet knows how to pick a route.

She lets us look with new eyes at the work of historians, curators and landscape architects who have crafted little enclaves within the city here that let the past speak for itself; the little colonial house with no walls but a door and a frame, wooden furniture left to mark the former uses of spaces, we hear the echoes of tour guides as we step gingerly down the uneven sandstone stairs, we hear torrential rain falling, as is so common in Sydney, though it is not falling as we walk this evening.

We encounter more performers: people who make music out of the textures of the alleyways, the bins, the rock faces, discarded metals, steps. Our antagonist continues to visit us, threatening and slightly agitating. He is a loose canon.

We hear residents of Millers Point whose public houses are now being sold off. We hear Janet’s co-creator George talking to Janet sometimes. He says: “think of what we could play here – all that stuff we listened to while researching for this piece” and we here a selection of random old recordings that must be related somehow.

Janet loves the little old terraces that look down on Pottinger Place, so enfeebled in their domesticity against the dramatic sandstone rockface they sit upon. They prompt her to remember the nightmares she experienced as a child; she looks up at the windows and wonders what deeds of wrongdoing could be placed there, in a spooky film.

There are generations of families going back in time here; the alleys are layered by memories of childhood, kids swimming out into the harbour from the wharf. We depart the scene, the forking path takes us away, back to the Harbour Bridge, Janet is noticing the tree roots in the standstone rocks as we clamber up stairs, then she leaves us at the entrance to the foot tunnel under the bridge.

We are left alone, with our smartphone. The smartphone is still playing the film, it takes us now through the illuminated fluorescent walkway, the view tips upside down, perhaps we are the ones underneath the harbour now, alone here, with our smartphones, in the city, at night.

The work of Janet Cardiff and George Bueres Miller has spanned cities and continents, forests and galleries, small boats and abandoned filing cabinets. These artists are in the business of making magic spaces.

They come from the line of Borges, they return again and again to his stories, his metaphors, this city of forking paths is a map that has become as big as the world. For this Sydney project, Janet and George worked on and off for about a year, commissioned by the City of Sydney as the ‘inaugural artwork’ within its ‘permanent art collection’.

How strange for a work such as this to be classified a permanent artwork. Whether an app is a permanent thing is one thing. But the experience conjured is also the very antithesis of what we would ordinarily describe as a ‘permanent artwork’: an experience of time, fractured by spatial passages, layered and forked and stacked without end.

The work is also described as ‘Augmented Reality’, aligning with the tech-boom taking the ad world by storm. We are all going to be augmenting our realities all the time, soon, likely not with clunky smartphones but watches, glasses, earpieces. How quaint all of our glowing rectangles will soon become!

This artwork riffs of our curiosity with what augmentation might feel like, but this is not really ‘digital art’ in a technical sense, there is no geodata underpinning it, but there are loose references to its conventions. You can only access the app that drives the tour at Customs House, from dusk. Any other time or place and you are locked out.

The artists seem to be tricking up the technology conventions here: augmented reality is not only about space as code, it is also about space as a remembered, fractured, haunted territory. At one point we see in the crowds only people walking, looking at their glowing rectangles, talking on them, for Janet this feels ghastly, you know she wants people to see beyond them, just as she uses the device to show you this.

In 1996 Janet made a soundwalk for London’s Brick Lane called The Missing Voice and you could listen to it using a walkman; you had to borrow the tape from the library. She’s added video now and the sound is better but her tugging at the possibilities of space and time plays with the same basic toolset: the re-sculpting of embodied experience using the ultimate augmented reality that is sound, using her voice, urging intimacy, speaking loneliness, placing the strangeness of our urban natures back into our immediate view.

We here in Sydney will know our streets to be a little bit different now that Janet’s been here.

http://www.cardiffmiller.com/

This is the first of two pieces reflecting on The City of Forking Paths.  

Last Drinks

It’s been awhile between drinks. So a few updates to follow with news of what I’ve been up to and projects a’happening. Most noteworthy for now is the latest installation featuring as part of the City of Sydney’s 2012 Art & About Festival. The success of Unguarded Moments in 2011 led to funding for a major project for the 2012 Festival.

Last Drinks – One More Round at the Hotel Australia

Imagine a hotel so grand that famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt performed at its opening night in 1891; an establishment so glamorous that it was the hotel of choice for Hollywood heavyweights Katharine Hepburn, Shirley Bassey and Sir Robert Helpmann â?? and you will be recreating the famed Hotel Australia.

The video and sound installation project, Last Drinks: One more round at the Hotel Australia, is part of the City of Sydney’s 11th annual Art & About Festival running from 21 September until 21 October 2012. A series of night time installations will re-inscribe the hidden history of the precinct back onto the buildings and laneways of the precinct, enabling memories of sophistication and style to collide with the present day.

Visit the Last Drinks website to find out more.

Here’s a selection of videos from the project.

Last Drinks: Australia Hotel, Commonwealth Bank, Martin Place from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Last Drinks video installation, Commonwealth Bank, Martin Place Sydney from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Rowe St video projections for Last Drinks, Art & About Sydney 2012 from sarah barns on Vimeo.

Lees Court video projections, Last Drinks project, Art & About Sydney 2012 from sarah barns on Vimeo.

If you plan to make it along before the Festival finishes – do consult the map before you go. There are also signs and maps around the site and an msite to help you around. But to be sure, here is a map of the installations.

Unguarded Moments: In full view

WHAT IF faces from the past were visible again, watching us in our streets and laneways?

This question was the premise of Unguarded Moments, a series of site-specific video installations featuring in selected locations throughout Walsh Bay and Millers Point during Art & About Sydney 2011. The project was supported by the City of Sydney and the result of a collaboration between designer Michael Killalea of killanoodle and myself as researcher and producer.

Projections drew from documentary films and photographs, featuring past & present residents and workers. In this way, the history of the working port, its waterside workers and its residents were re-inscribed back into its present day environment – exteriors of buildings, interiors of shopfronts, sandstone walls, and even the underside of a wharf. The website was also developed to provide more in-depth coverage of the many different films, photographs, and people that featured in the film projections. An intensely fascinating project, with incredible support from the City of Sydney and past and present residents of Millers Point.

Here’s a selection of videos projected as part of the installations. Produced by Michael Killalea and edited by Gabrielle Dowrick. Generous support from the National Film and Sound Archive.

‘Views’ – excerpts.

This projection features landscape imagery of Millers Point, rear projected through the front window of 44 Argyle Place Millers Point. Projection one of nine featuring as part of Unguarded Moments Millers Point, for Art and About Sydney 2011. Original photos sourced from a number of collections including the City of Sydney archives, the State Records Authority and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority.

Local Lives – Abraham Mott Hall.

Projection featuring community photos featuring as part of Unguarded Moments Millers Point, featuring as part of Art & About Sydney 2011. This is a close-up of the projection shot from the roof of the Abraham Mott Hall.

Girl Eating a Sandwich – Walsh Bay

Video loop, 2011.
Rear projection
Shop 12, 23 Hickson Rd.Video loop, 2011.
Sourced from Rupert Kathner’s Australia Today: Customs Officer’s War Against Drugs (1938).
With support from the National Film and Sound Archive Australia.

Big Industry – Hickson Rd Millers Point

Video loop, Hickson Rd, Millers Point. Sourced from archival film footage shot on location. Credits include Waterside Workers Federation Film Unit The Hungry Miles (1955), Pensions for Veterans (1954) and November Victory (1953).

Power, Pickups and Protest
Projected onto Pottinger St, Walsh Bay.

Unguarded Moments – Art & About Sydney 2011

Unguarded Moments is a new project I’m working on as part of Art & About Sydney 2011. The project has been selected as the ‘City Villages’ project and will be based around the wharves of Walsh Bay and up through to Millers Point.

For the project’s accompanying website, I’ve been able to set up some useful hyperlocal services, using Channels on Flickr and YouTube to aggregrate and re-publish a number of images and films relating the area. It’s amazing how much the web has changed since I worked on Sidetracks only 3 years ago.

Check out the website here.

More to come on this project.

Remembering the Green Bans

I had the pleasure of attending a great forum at the Institute of Australian Geographers Conference on Tuesday on the topic of the Green Bans. This year we are seeing a number of events and articles on the topic, marking the 40th anniversary of this particularly intense period of urban activism in Australia.

Bob and Margaret Fagan opened the first session with song – Margaret sang ‘City of Green‘ and Bob gave a heartfelt rendition of ‘Monuments’. Both were written by the godfather of Australian union songs, Denis Kevans.

Excerpt of the Green Bans Mural, Woolloomooloo. Image by Sarah Barns, 2008.

It was hard not to be moved by the sentiment of these songs – and be reminded of the potential for academic inquiry be not only of the head but also of the heart. Having used an excerpt of ‘City of Green’ at the end of my 2007 soundwalk I was particularly moved to hear it performed in person by Margaret. We closed the session with a screening of Denise White and Pat Fiske’s Woolloomooloo, taking us back to the hectic days on Victoria St in 1974, days when the wharfie Mick Fowler lambasted the developers for kicking out low income people from their homes, when Wendy Bacon squatted with the rest of them and promoted the values of alternative community living, when council aldermen sounded like Andrew Briger – see below. I fear people of such poise no longer walk this earth…

Many thanks to Kurt Iveson and Nicole Cook for organising the session.

Victoria St Soundwalk

What’s so special about Victoria St?

Victoria St has long been one of Sydney’s most prized locations, described by the National Trust in the 1970s as the ‘Montmartre of Sydney’.

It was also the site of the first public housing campaign in Australia (Ashton 1993: 104). In 1971 first-time property developer Frank Theeman acquired whole rows of houses here through his company Victoria Point Pty Ltd, with plans to demolish the terrace houses and build a number of office and apartment towers. Theeman gained council approval for his plans in March 1973, when he began to issue eviction notices to tenants of these properties, many of which were boarding houses available for low rent.

Read on…

LISTEN IN:

1. Soundwalk:’I built a city of green, the best you’ve ever seen’

2. 115 Victoria St: Mick Fowlerâ??s Funeral

3. 202 Victoria St: Juanita’s home

  1. Wendy’s speech outside 115 Victoria St

More Green Bans…

[1] This is the way Wendy Bacon described Sydney in her speech outside 115 Victoria St in 1974, featured in my Victoria St soundwalk.

[2] Accounts of what happened on Victoria St that day are available through a number of web resources, and are documented by Pat Fiske in Woolloomooloo (1979). References include Milliss (1974); Milliss and Brennan (1974); Rees (2004); Squatspace (2004); Burgmann and Burgmann (1993). The transcript of an interview with Mundey reflecting on the importance of the Green Bans to the development of Australian cities is available from the ABC at http://www.abc.net.au/tv/talkingheads/txt/s2649576.htm

Sydney Sidetracks

Sydney Sidetracks is a multi-platform initiative supported by ABC Innovation to explore the distribution of the ABCâ??s audio-visual archive using map and mobile interfaces. The site was launched in November 2008, featuring over 50 stories about Sydney, which represent â??points of interestâ?? on a map that users can explore either online or out and about in Sydney using their mobile phone.

Continue reading

Sidetracks launches

Drum roll…

After a period of gestation, Sydney Sidetracks has been launched by ABC Innovation in partnership with ABC Local Radio 702 Sydney. You can read more background information about Sydney Sidetracks on this website here.

Here’s some excerpts from the media release of 10 November 2008.

Discover history where it happened with ABC Sydney Sidetracks on your mobile or online at abc.net.au/sidetracks

Uncover Sydneyâ??s hidden past â?? the people, buildings and events that shaped a town â?? by visiting abc.net.au/sidetracks.

Sydney Sidetracks is a new multi-platform, interactive project from ABC Innovation which enables audiences to discover history where it happened on the streets of inner city Sydney. It is a unique service showcasing a rich range of historic audio, film, text and images all accessible via an interactive map, which can be seen on a mobile phone while out and about or online at abc.net.au/sidetracks.

Sydney Sidetracks uses new technology to explore some of Sydneyâ??s oldest inner city suburbs; Circular Quay and The Rocks, Kings Cross, Paddington, Pyrmont, Redfern, Surry Hills, Sydney CBD and South and East Sydney.

“This is the first offering of its kind in this country. By combining the resources of Australia’s oldest broadcaster with the incredible collections of other great cultural institutions it starts to build an interactive social history of Australia’s oldest city”, says Sarah Barns, concept developer, researcher and content producer on Sidetracks.

Sidetracks collection – highlights

RADIO WAVES

VP DAY 1945: Talbot Duckmanton recording the crowds celebrating VP Day, 1945 in Martin Place.

Reproduced courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.
Reproduced courtesy of the Australian War Memorial.

While the NFSA has some interesting film footage of these moments, the sound quality is poor. It’s also owned by Cinesound and so re-publishing has some rights limitations. But more importantly, the commentary provided in this piece by Duckmanton to his radio listeners is fascinating, full of great little details about the man on Pitt St directing traffic (he wasn’t, that day), the effigy of Hitler being hung from a building in Martin Place (which one?), the ladies dancing in the street (“fine-looking ladies, too”) and bringing to our attention the sounds of the mosquito flying overhead. It really is like being there, listening in. Thanks very much to John Spence for locating this special recording for me.

Listen in to VP Day, 1945

ROBERT MENZIES AT THE SYDNEY STADIUM

Radio may not have been new in 1948, but a recording of then Prime Minister Robert Menzies being heckled by communists at the Sydney Stadium is one of the oldest radio recordings I could locate in the ABC Archives. You can hear it in the audio ‘Old Tin Shed’ that features as part of the Sydney Stadium selection. Also worth a mention here is a link to 1908 footage of boxing legend Jack Johnson training for his fight against Canadian Tommy Burns, in which he became Heavyweight Champion of the World – the first African American to win that title.

Burns vs Johnson fight, 1908. Image reproduced courtesy of the State Library of NSW
Burns vs Johnson fight, 1908. Image reproduced courtesy of the State Library of NSW

MOVING IMAGE

GEORGE ST 1906

Nothing can really top the footage held in the collection of the National Film and Sound Archive taken from the front of a tram travelling down George St in 1906. It gives you an incredibly detailed view of the streetscape of the day, what the city streets were like before cars and before skyscrapers – the Queen Victoria Building is a huge behemoth in the distance. Thanks to the National Film and Sound Archives Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research for assistance with this piece.

STILL IMAGE

The image of the AMP building down at Circular Quay is striking in the way it shows how out of scale, how guargantuan these artefacts would have been at the time of the first skyscrapers.

Reproduced courtesy of the City of Sydney archives
Reproduced courtesy of the City of Sydney archives

DOCUMENTARY HIGHLIGHT: LIVING ON THE FRINGE

Another highlight is the footage from Living on the Fringe, an ABC documentary from 1965 that investigates life on the slum fringes of inner city Sydney, which at the time included places like Redfern, Surry Hills and Darlinghurst. Directed by Italian filmmaker Gian Carlo Manara. In evidence is not only the massive changes experienced to the social demographics of Sydney’s inner city, but also how styles of social commentary have changed as well. Its coverage of the indigenous populations of Redfern was too outrageous to include, I was sure it would provoke too many painful memories of what it would have liked living in the incredibly racist society that Australia was at that time.

The pieces selected for inclusion here include:

  • Redfern Community Life
  • A narration from the owner of one of the first Italian restaurants in Sydney at 181 Palmer St, East Sydney
  • Life ‘in the midst of darkness’ around Surry Hills, outside St. Francis church on Albion St

TV NEWS

There’s a lot of footage from ABC TV’s vault. The highlights are all from the long-running ABC documentary series This Day Tonight. A highlight is a TDT special on Sydney’s underground gambling scene as it was in 1973. There’s a nice illustrative recreation of the scenes in one of the clubs, and some funny footage of long-haired Stuart Littlemoore and Mike Carlton atop the ABC studios on William St, trying to catch some action at the notorious Forbes Club opposite them (when there wasn’t any…). Also worth viewing is the whole commentary on Juanita Nielsen’s disappearance, including a TDT feature from 1976, one year after her disappearance.

WHEN OLD TECHNOLOGIES WERE NEW…

FIRST TELEVISION BROADCAST

Television was introduced in Australia in 1956, after a 10-year delay during which time Australian policy makers carved out the most appropriate regulatory framework for this new, powerful medium. It just so happened that the first broadcast was beamed from Kellet St, just behind what is now the Coca-Cola building in Kings Cross (I’m told the streetscape was slightly different then to what it is now). Watch the ABC’s first television broadcast here.

'Outside Broadcast Van' outside Kellett St, Kings Cross c1958
Outside Broadcast Van on Kellett St, Kings Cross c1958

Remember when a mobile phone looked like a brick and if you talked into one everyone thought you were a wanker? Catch Michael Jay using one of those bricks to organise his ‘Carnival of the Minds’ rave at the then-abandoned Eveleigh Railyards in 1994.

But it’s not only media technologies that feature. Along with the George St tram footage, there is a wonderful selection of images featuring Sydney’s once-proud tram network, including a painting from the State Library collection of the first night the tram ran. Did you know that Sydney once boasted one of the largest tram networks in the world?

Trams down William St, Sydney c.1957. Reproduced courtesy of the City of Sydney archives

RADIO INTERVIEWS

CHOW HAYES

In 1990 Margaret Throsby interviewed Sydney’s most notorious gunman Chow Hayes following the release of David Hickie’s biography Chow Hayes: Gunman. Hayes speaks candidly to Throsby about his life of crime as the most feared man in all of Sydney. He must have been pretty old at the time but his mind was still strong – he recounts his first murder on Mary St, Surry Hills in impressive detail.

Juanita Nielsen outside her home at 202 Victoria St, Kings Cross, 1974. ABC Copyright.
Juanita Nielsen outside her home at 202 Victoria St, Kings Cross, 1974. ABC Copyright.

Juanita Nielsen is also featured here, speaking to the ABC in 1974, one year before her fatal disappearance in 1975. In this interview the wealthy hieress speaks about coming home from London, and her decision to move back to Kings Cross, the place she loved best of all. It was Nielsen’s passion for the Cross that ultimately cost her her life. The whole subject of the controversial Victoria St high-rise development is covered in detail at a number of locations on Victoria St, from Juanita’s house at 202, to Mick Fowler’s flat at 115 and outside the Victoria Heights building as well. Victoria Heights includes a wonderful full-length radio feature from Double J in 1977 produced by David Ives called ‘The Ballad of Victoria St’ (thanks Chris Winter!).

TALKING BUILDINGS

Mural of the BLF Green Bans, cnr Cathedral  and Forbes St Woolloomooloo
Mural of the BLF Green Bans, cnr Cathedral and Forbes St Woolloomooloo

There are a number of features that concentrate on Sydney’s built environment, and controversies surrounding certain developments around Sydney. Not everyone knows how significant Sydney’s BLF Green Bans were to the birth of urban environmental activism globally – people like Paul Ehrlich regarded the movement as a watershed in thinking about cities and their environmental as well as social implications. Along with the whole saga of Victoria St, you can listen in to The Rocks in 1973, when the BLF were holding up $300m of development all around Sydney, and watch footage of Woolloomooloo at the time as well. There’s an audio piece that includes actuality recording of the Hotel Australia being auctioned to the MLC Insurance company for $9.5m in 1968 (thanks to Wendy Borches for this find), as well as Mr LJ Hooker speaking about his development ambitions for the country in 1958. Developer greed is a bit of a theme here, obviously.

Listen here to a selection of audio archives about the Hotel Australia – once fine ‘Hotel of the Commonwealth’.

Some of the ‘Talking buildings’ here are iconic – the Sydney Opera House, for example, which includes video footage of Paul Robeson singing to construction workers at the site of the building in 1960. Other are less well known – 150-152 Elizabeth St is the first building to be heritage-listed for its significance to indigenous Australians as the site of the first Aboriginal Day of Mourning in 1937.

NIGHTS OUT

Rock and roll in Paddington in 1958 is pretty funny – this was when police first figured if they took the party to their place they’d save the local milk bar owners a few headaches, leading to the whole blue light disco scene eventually. Midnight Oil playing the Stage Door Tavern in 1979 is also a gem – the ABC’s Double J were there to record the whole show, and not only that but drummer Rob Hirst has also recalled his version of that notorious gig (thanks to Cath Dwyer for that tip).

RADIO DOCUMENTARIES

There are some wonderful, full-length radio documentaries from ABC Radio National’s archives included in the selection. I have edited some of these, basically to provide the opportunity for users to listen to excerpts on location, via the mobile application or downloaded directly to the ipod. Needless to say the full features are well worth a listen, and here’s your chance to dowload them too, if you missed it the first time aroud…

Of course, it’s not as though I haven’t trawled through a tonne of material to locate the many gems that feature on the site. I think it’s all pretty cool, really.

Contacts, comments, criticisms, suggestions, more stories…

Do contact the ABC with any comments or suggestions you have about the site and any of its material. And if you’ve got something you think you (or your grandparents!) can add – head straight to the Your Stories section.

Jaywalking Sydney

Jaywalking Sydney was a Research Fellowship undertaken through the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) Centre for Scholarly and Archival Research in February-March of 2007.

This was an exploratory exercise to identify how archival recordings about specific Sydney locations could be made available in-situ using mobile devices (ipods, mobile phones etc).

The essential idea was to test how use of audiovisual archives in this way could offer the opportunity to experience decisive and transformative moments in an areaâ??s development over time, to experience what happened ‘right here’. More broadly the research would establish new ways to explore and experience Australiaís audiovisual archives by new and existing audiences.

Outcomes included a soundwalk dealing with Victoria St Potts Pt, a Google Map featuring extensive audio-visual archives of Sydney’s film history and an essay called Jaywalking Sydney. More details can be found here.

Research for the Fellowship was framed by a particular focus on Sydney’s urban development, on stories and features about changes to the built environment itself. With this in mind, research was focused on the following questions:

  • What exists? What kinds of archival material is available that relates to specific locations around Sydney? What kinds of sound recordings are held by the NFSA that contain ambient archival recordings of key locations? Here I was testing feasibility of actually embedding ambient archival audio into a present environment, starting by locating what actually exists of this nature.
  • What motivated these original recordings? Why have sites and sounds been documented, and what motivates their preservation by the NFSA? How in particular does the NFSA identify audio recordings of significance, and are there different motivations at work to its collection and curation of arhival video?
  • How can existing archival recordings be made available on location? What technologies are available, what platforms? What are the opportunities and challenges of working in this way?