Interactive soundwalks
by Dafna Naphtali
powered by U-GRUVE AR.
WALKIE TALKIE DREAM GARDEN (Williamsburg/Brooklyn – running though area under construction 4-28-21)
WALKIE TALKIE DREAM GARDEN (Hamburg/Germany)
WALKIE TALKIE DREAM ANGLES (Washington Square Park, New York City – app under maintenance 4-28-21)
WALKIE TALKIE DREAM GARDEN
More info and download the Walkie Talkie Dream Garden app.
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden is an interactive soundwalk for the waterfront areas in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Hamburg (Germany) developed by sound artist and composer Dafna Naphtali. Since launching in 2018 and for the foreseeable future, anyone can download the app to experience the walk 24/7 exclusively on-site in Williamsburg and Hamburg.
Walk, run, ride or listen on the passing ferry to experience the sounds of the Williamsburg Brooklyn waterfront, and hear historical and imagined soundscapes, juxtaposed with vocal pieces to recreate the former Bushwick Creek, trainyards from Williamsburg’s industrial past, and playground equipment whimsically transformed into percussion, and a giant marimba.
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden is experienced via a free mobile-device app using U-GRUVE AR Audio Augmented-Reality platform by Richard Rodkin. Geo-tagged audio files, originally recorded on-site to create short electroacoustic compositions, are played / altered by the physical (GPS) location of the participants listening over headphones. Available on-site only in Williamsburg Brooklyn (NY, USA) and the Wilhelmsburg neighborhood of Hamburg (Germany), the work focusing and commenting on uniques sounds of industrial and post-industrial-artist-occupied-gentrifying areas. Also planned is full-length album, with previews available on Bandcamp. The project is with funding from NYSCA, Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Hamburg Cultural Council, and launched in Hamburg June 9, 2018 and Brooklyn September 15, 2018.
videography: Ihunmehai Isaac for New School University.
(Downloads and tech info: Go to wtdg.org for information about the free download for iOS/Apple and Android and for the Wilhelmsburg/Germany versions, or https://tinyurl.com/wtdg-download
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden on social media:
Facebook
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden is being created as part of “The Wil(helms|liams)burg project”, (“w-burg”) an exchange program of composers in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg and Hamburg’s Wilhelmsburg neighborhoods, using sounds the two neighborhoods have in common. The two-year project included 2017 concerts by the participating artists at established festivals in Hamburg (48h Wilhelmsburg Festival, June 2017) and Brooklyn (NY Electroacoustic Music Festival at National Sawdust, July 2017).
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden’s Williamsburg/Brooklyn walk will encompasses the Williamsburg waterfront, from the former Domino Sugar factory to Bushwick inlet, from Kent Avenue extending into the East River, to be experienced from the piers and passing ferries, with large structures that become oversized virtual instruments so participants can shape their own musical experience as they walk, run, or ride.
In Hamburg, Germany’s Wilhelmsburg neighborhood, the sister WTDG sound walk (launched June 2018) was created along Veringkanal from the Honigfabrik (Honey Factory), along the canal, in an walking area with small boat launches, galleries, cafes, fisherman, former factories, willow trees, wooden walkways and large structures related to its industrial past.
Preliminary work and site-scouting for Walkie Talkie Dream Garden began with Naphtali’s sound collection and investigation of both cities in 2017. These audio recordings 
will be processed, contrasted, intermingled and exchanged between the two cities, to create the sounds for the free app (iOS and Android) that launched in Hamburg and Williamsburg, Brooklyn 2018 as part of the second round of the w-burg exchange project. In both cities, Walkie Talkie Dream Garden is presented as an interactive soundwalk and as a participatory public performance.
Walkie Talkie Dream Garden builds on prior work and ideas developed while creating Walkie Talkie Dream Angles for Washington Square Park in New York City 2016, also with the U-Gruve platform. Walkie Talkie Dream Angles was created for the NoiseGate acoustic ecology festival (2016), allowing participants to traverse sonically interesting corners of the park, and underscoring the loss of quiet, past and future sounds, bringing a favorite urban environment to life in a sonically unique and individual way, as I layered processed environmental sounds, I recorded on-site, with tracks of my voice, percussion, and thoughtful strategizing about site-specific listening, interactivity and attention span. Walkie Talkie Dream Angles and U-Gruve were featured at Creative Tech Week NYC, 2017.
U-GRUVE, by creative technologist Richard Rodkin, enables the creation of interactive soundtracks for public spaces using listener/participants phones and GPS sensors to trigger geo-tagged musical outcomes to predefined zones in the targeted environment. http://u-gruve.com/
Funding for Walkie Talkie Dream Garden comes from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC), with additional support from the Hamburg Cultural Council, and is a Harvestworks Sponsored Project.
