Month: June 2018

The ‘Audio Walk’ as a Format of Experiential Walking

Berlin-Neukölln, Ganghoferstr. │ 16.04.2018 (Foto: Denise Wilde)

In recent times, audio walks as a new artistic format of imparting and acquiring knowledge are on the rise in urban centres. These acoustic tours combine walking, seeing and hearing with the exploration of the city and information about its history or other topics such as architecture, typography, gender, body, time or ‘shopping worlds’. Audio walks are of interest for a phenomenological approach because of the particular way in which they address topics such as body, lived body, thing, materiality, individual, society, time and space through walking, seeing and hearing as well as feeling and tasting. With the help of an audio device (mobile phone, mp3 player, tablet) onto which an auditory manual and map of events is downloaded, the walk commences immediately.
The format operates with the fact that every individual moves within the urban space and it aims at framing this habitual form of walking differently, so that perception and observation become more open. Thus, sight and hearing become alert to things undiscovered and hidden as well as to trivial, everyday occurrences.
In walking and sauntering, the city becomes approach-able; things overlooked and ignored become tangible in walking. Although the experiential walk is accompanied acoustically, it is not guided throughout: in halting, lingering and pressing pause on the pause button, the walkers can choose new positions within and towards their environment and learn about historically and scientifically researched as well as biographically experienced urban history and histories of knowledge.
Concerning its theoretical framework, concepts of art, cultural science and sociology, literature and philosophy regarding sauntering (see Walter Benjamin and Zygmunt Bauman) and walking (see Frédéric Gros ‘A Philosophy of Walking’, Jakob Flach’s ‘The Art of Walking’, Ilja Trojanow, Henry David Thoreau’s essay on walking, the works of Lucius Burkhardt and Bertram Weisshaar on promenadology and Gudrun M. König’s cultural history of walking) as forms of life are combined.
Audio walk is suitable for individual walks of exploration as well as joint strolls through the city, since the bodily-embodied experience and the communication about things heard and seen (as well as tasted and felt) can co-occur.
Audio walk as an experiential form of walking decelerates the pace, stimulates perspectives and produces sounds and voices beyond the hectic pulse of a city full of stimuli and noise.

→ Necessary devices and materials

  • Mobile audio device (mobile phone, mp3 player, tablet)
  • Headphones
  • Printer (to print out map of events)

→ Audio walks in Berlin

Overview of further historical-political tours for mobile phones or tablets in and around Berlin

→ Audio walks in other cities
Memory Loops in Munich

Denise Wilde

Michael Schratz: Phenomenological school research

Michael Schratz is this year’s holder of the Fritz-Karsen-Chair of the Professional School of Educatioon at Humboldt-University Berlin. In his presentation Lernseits des Geschehens tobt das Leben, lehrseits herrscht die Didaktik he introduces the phenomenological oriented approach to vignette research for school pedagogy and pedagogical professionalisation.

See here: https://www.budrich-journals.de/index.php/zisu/article/view/17407

Malte Brinkmann

Introduction in phenomenological education sience

Dear phenomenologists,

Kristin Westphal (Koblenz University) gives an introduction to phenomenological education sience.

https://owncloud.uni-koblenz-landau.de/owncloud/s/HDRNjmHE2pksfcX

Malte Brinkmann

Upcoming events

Dear Phenomenologists,

I would like to share with you some very interesting upcoming events concerning phenomenology.

Time, the Body, and the Other – Phenomenological and Psychopathological Approaches
13 Sep 2018 – 15 Sep 2018
Medizinische Klinik Heidelberg
(mit Shaun Gallagher, Natalie Depraz und Dan Zahavi)

Phenomenology as Performative Exercise
31 Aug 2018 – 02 Sep 2018
TU Dresden 01069 Dresden

Leibliche Interaktion. Phaenomenologische Annaeherungen an einen soziologischen Grundbegriff
by the “Interdisziplinärer Arbeitskreis Phänomenologien und Soziologie” of the DGS-Section “sociological theory”
28 Jun 2018 – 29 Jun 2018
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

Kind Regards

Malte Brinkmann