Soundwalking : creating stewardship for local waterways

Abstract

For my dissertation, I have created two large bodies of work that address environmental issues of the Hudson River in Troy, NY: Riverfront Park Soundwalk (2016), an artist audio tour, and I have expanded the soundwalk experience out to further experimentation with a “meta” project called SleepWalks: The Body of Dreams (2016), a state-funded (NYSCA) multi-media dance performance based on the collaborative local waterways-themed dreams of participants of two-overnight SleepWalks performances. My soundwalks are a not only an artistic practice and methodological tool, but also they were used as a method for creating the SleepWalks: The Body of Dreams dance performance.

Soundwalking : creating stewardship for local waterways

My dissertation, “Soundwalking : creating stewardship for local waterways,” is an examination of how soundwalking can be a creative catalyst that highlights the importance of “stewardship” in regards to our natural resources and more specifically to water. The soundwalks that are used in my artistic practice are based on listening to the sonic environment as a participatory artistic event for interactivity. Furthermore, along with using a soundwalk as an artistic practice, I am proposing that soundwalks can be a tool, a methodology, for discovering the connected or disconnected feelings that one may have for an area of environmental pollution in order to inspire a sense of “stewardship” in the participant. My contribution to the already established artistic practice of soundwalks is that I link my projects to the notion of fostering a sense of stewardship for one’s local environment in the context of environmental psychology. I use the term “stewardship” to include how human beings re-envision themselves and their place in the natural world as part of a larger integrated system. I define stewardship further in Chapter 2.

I am focusing my dissertation on the issue of why we seem to not be able to identify ourselves as a part of a larger whole as a species to overcome larger survivalist issues such as climate change and water pollution. I believe that environmental psychology points to what is hindering us, and it also shows that creativity can be used to address challenges posed by environmental pollution. I propose that my soundwalks can assist in becoming creative methodologies for overcoming these psychological hurdles by encouraging the engagement of participants from diverse backgrounds to take a soundwalk as a platform to then form a dialogue together over the issues of the local waterways that involves the act of listening.