Unvoiced Territories (2021-)

Sound, text, mobile app

Project by Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec

Unvoiced Territories is a sonic situation in outdoor public spaces and their virtual shadows that outlines a zone for experimental wandering, lingering, reading, contemplating, surveillance, mapping, movement, listening, sounding and voice. To inhabit and activate the work, visit the geographical location of the work and download the mobile app Unvoiced Territories.

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Text that only appears on the app is digitally inscribed onto public space accompanied by mediated sound to establish an invisible spatial setting in the city. Self-developed software maps the text onto the ground and also to prerecorded voices who read it – such that the letters on the map correspond to their speech sounds. Visitors can traverse the text written “on” the city, as their tracked phones emit the phonemes according to their movements over the text.

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Unvoiced Territories is a permanent sonic installation and performative platform as path, shelter, itinerary, trace, poetic pause and place to gather. It is a hybrid voice that stutters at the threshold between thought and the murmur of a world carried through the city by bodies.

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The pilot version of the project takes place in central Ljubljana, Slovenia, between three bridges, Tivoli park, the train station and Križanke.

For the occasion of the application launch a sound intervention took place, where a group of participants with mobile phones and portable loudspeakers walked together activating the work by sounding it in public space.