Ximena Alarcon

INTIMAL is a physical virtual embodied system for relational listening that integrates body movement, oral archives, and voice expression through telematic improvisatory performance in migratory contexts. It has been informed by nine Colombian migrant women who express their migratory journeys through free body movement, voice and spoken word improvisation. These improvisations have been recorded using Motion Capture, in order to develop interfaces for co-located and telematic interactions for the sharing of narratives of migration. In this paper, using data from the Motion Capture experiments, we are exploring two specific movements from improvisers: displacements on space (walking, rotating), and breathing data. Here we envision how co-relations between walking and breathing, might be further studied to implement interfaces that help the making of connections between place, and the feeling of presence for people in-between distant locations.

The following paper has been published as part of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10 (2); a special issue based on a selection of papers and performances at Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance, a two-day international conference (11th-12th of April 2013) exploring the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. Abstract Two internet-based sonic performances, Letters and Bridges (between Leicester and Mexico City), and Migratory Dreams (between London and Bogotá), were developed by the artist with the leading question of what the 'in-between' space (Bhaba 1994; Ortega 2008) sounds like in the context of migration. Drawing on a Deep Listening (Oliveros 2005) practice, the artist undertook pre-performance workshops as a way to engage participants in the possibilities of travelling in time and space, and expressing through voice and other sounds feelings that...

Abstract: This paper re-visits my creative and research experiences with the creation of sound-driven interfaces for navigation and performance, as part of a personal quest for space and identity. Involving geographical migration, its sonic experience and the connections mediated with internet technologies, the experience of listening and performing within dislocation refers not only to the development of technological systems, but also to the exploration of new forms of interacting with the self and others through listening and sounding in distant locations, inviting participants to the discovery of ‘in-between’ sonic spaces for being. Derived from the need for a shared conceptual and technical framework, the project ‘Sound Matters Framework’ has explored, with other sound artists and researchers, practices of interrogation and relational playback for the creative interplay of field recordings and speech. The framework has evolved into the idea of creating interfaces for relational...

After four years developing telematic sonic performances via the Internet, listening to the ‘in-between’ space in the context of human migration (Alarcon, 2014; 2015; 2016), I argue that questions derived from technical challenges and accessibility suggest the exploration of mobile phones for such performances. I suggest key components to develop an app turning around the concept of ‘in-betweeness’ (Ortega, 2008), which finds resonances with the concept ‘net-locality’ (de Souza e Silva, 2013), emerging from people’s interaction in a mobile space. Focusing on a qualitative review of apps, I propose a taxonomy of listening and performing to facilitate and widen the exploration of ‘in-betweeness’.

This paper describes a multidisciplinary encounter with oral testimony archives and their incorporation in the artistic research project INTIMAL. It explores ways in which to creatively listen to stories which might be emotionally challenging, and to create and sustain empathy with these disembodied voices, which contain a shared history as fissures of sixty years of violence.

This chapter situates my creative process as provoking expressions that make audible the individual and collective negotiations and connections between distant locations within urban mobility contexts and geographical migrations. It highlights my interest in creating technological mediated frameworks that aid individual and collective expressions for the emergence of narratives of interstitial spaces. In the book, the chapter contributes to a dialogue within the international environmental sound art movement. About this book: Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from tradit...

INTIMAL is an interactive system for relational listening, which integrates physical-virtual interfaces for people to sonically improvise between distant locations. The aim is to embrace two key aspects in the context of human migration: the sense of place and the sense of presence. This paper reflects on the use of INTIMAL in a long-distance improvisation between the cities of Oslo, Barcelona and London in May 2019. This improvisation was performed by nine Colombian migrant women, who had been involved in a research process using the Deep Listening® practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. Here we describe the performance setting and the implementation of the first two interfaces of the system: MEMENTO, an “embodied” navigator of an oral archive of Colombian women’s testimonies of conflict and migration; and RESPIRO, a sonification system that transmits and sonifies live, breathing signals between distant locations. We reflect on how the two interfaces facilitated and challenged the...

In this audio essay, presented on March 5th, in FOOT2017 Festival in the Panel ‘Cultures and Listening’, in Toronto, the listener is invited to immerse on the migrant women’s reflections on the space that has been shared, and the connections that they have established. Two telematic performances created in May and July 2016 are treated as sound archives interwoven with women’s creative process, their reflections and my commentaries. In-between bilingual voices, the listener is invited to perform a reflective listening exercise extracting the essence of the project beyond complete linguistic understanding. Suelo Fertil is envisioned as a sustainable artistic platform: embracing virtual connections as a sonic architecture that connects physical spaces, to support the grounding and expansion of migrant women, so as to flourish in any soil.

"Listening and Remembering - Improvisation" is a networked improvisation for commuters, focusing on voice expression while listening to soundscape. It can be seen as both an electroacoustic music performance in real-time and also as a networked collaborative experience. This performance is part of the practice-led research project "Linking urban soundscapes via commuters' memories". Please visit "Sounding Underground" for further information about the project.

In 1997 the creation of a virtual underground was somehow a bizarre idea that the author attempted to realize. First, the representation of metaphors of a metro in a multimedia format opened ideas of what could be possible to achieve on the Internet, e.g. how sound fragments uploaded by different people could run on the same navigational interface and what this mixture is telling us about our urban culture. How does it sound? Listening was the practice selected to perceive the whole of space and time relationships within a journey, and how these resonate with each individual. First in London, and later interconnecting the experience with Mexico and Paris, the author followed a mixed ethnographic method with commuters in each city, involving them in reflective and performative listening practices. Sounding Underground is the resulting interface that links the three cities’ metros, along with their cultures, evoking social, symbolic and political perceptions for each listener. The process followed by participants, and the interaction with the environment by users on the Internet, have opened paths for the acknowledgement and transformation of this experience, as each underground sonic journey becomes potentially a metaphor of a commuter’s life.

Migratory Dreams is a sonic exploration of dreams made by a group of four Colombians who have migrated to London, and a group of four Colombians residing in Bogota who have migrated through dreams, families, friends, and technology to many other spaces, and some of whom have migrated geographically and returned to their country. Dreamers have looked at the spaces where their dreams take place and the feelings associated with these in relation to their migrations. They have engaged in Deep Listening exercises, traveling in time and space through listening, and explored their sonic experience in dreams. When sharing their dreams they have amplified them in the waking reality with the help of the other dreamers, by listening and sounding, and have woven a collective dream in each city. In the Internet-based performance, Colombians from these distant locations meet to weave, in real-time, another dream, transcending even more the geographical spaces where the dreamers are, and where their dreams take place. This performance is part of the project "Networked migrations: listening to and performing the in-between space".

Networked Migrations explores the ‘in-between’ sonic space that exists within the context of migration, through Deep Listening and improvisatory performances on the Internet, in order to expand the perceived spaces that inform the migratory experience. Participants in distant locations followed a process of listening meditations, Chi Kung, dreamwork, voice improvisation, field-recording and collaborative work, concluding in real-time telematic performances using high quality audio streaming. In ‘Letters and Bridges’, a performance which took place between the cities of Leicester and Mexico on 12 March 2012, six migrants from around the world explored feelings by reading aloud old letters sent by loved ones and new letters that they had written to each other, extending the sonorities and experiences of their migrations in a multilingual exchange. A group from the audience, in each city, improvised with words and sounds, offering context from the cities where the performance took place. In ‘Migratory Dreams’, on 3 August 2012 four Colombians in London and four Colombians in Bogotá explored physical spaces manifested in dreams. They used their voices and pre-recorded sounds, opening space of healing for their varied experiences of geographical dislocation. The performance brought global audiences through the Internet broadcast via Resonance FM

Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as selected by commuters, as meaningful moments of sound from their commuting routine. Designed as a navigation structure, the environment draws on identifiable architectonic spaces such as entrances and corridors, but also incorporates more abstract ‘spaces’ based on memorable sounds that passengers had in common. The creation of the environment focused on the perception of social, political and symbolic experiences, and was derived from an iterative ethnographic and artistic practice which involved self-reflection, interviews, recordings of and listening to the journeys, and commuters' selections of sounds. This article describes the process of creation through the abstraction of a physical space, as well as the responses the work has evoked in the users and the academic community. It exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of practice-based research involving the creative use of digital technologies.

This paper describes the preliminary design of INTIMAL: a physical-virtual embodied interactive system for relational listening in the context of human migration, within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Informed by the Deep Listening experiences of nine Colombian migrant women in Europe, INTIMAL departs from their sensorial experience in dreams, virtual and physical spaces, for a holistic understanding of the body as interface that keeps memory of place. In counterpart with an oral archive of other women’s testimonies from the Colombian civil war, body movements, voice and spoken words act as resonances opening paths for healing experiences of loss.

After four years developing telematic sonic performances via the Internet, listening to the ‘in-between’ space in the context of human migration (Alarcón, 2014; 2015; 2016), I argue that questions derived from technical challenges and accessibility suggest the exploration of mobile phones for such performances. I suggest key components to develop an app turning around the concept of ‘in-betweeness’ (Ortega, 2008), which finds resonances with the concept ‘net-locality’ (de Souza e Silva, 2013), emerging from people’s interaction in a mobile space. Focusing on a qualitative review of apps, I propose a taxonomy of listening and performing to facilitate and widen the exploration of ‘in-betweeness’.

A partir de las memorias sonoras de los pasajeros del transporte público subterráneo en
Londres, México y París, creé el sitio interactivo en internet Sounding Underground. Esta
interfaz articula estructural y aleatoriamente la esencia de una memoria sónica subterránea.
Partiendo de la propuesta de Pauline Oliveros de escuchar profundamente como una práctica que incluye todas las sensaciones corporales, he considerado los sistemas físicos de transporte subterráneo y el entorno sonoro virtual que he creado, como “utopías” y “heterotopías” del sueño humano de movilidad. En este documento, sugiero que Sounding Underground actúa como una interfaz incorpórea que transforma potencialmente la memoria corporal, involucrando sentimientos asociados a lo “sublime”, como un legado de la Revolución Industrial.

INTIMAL is an interactive system for relational listening, which integrates physical-virtual interfaces for people to sonically improvise between distant locations. The aim is to embrace two key aspects in the context of human migration: the sense of place and the sense of presence. This paper reflects on the use of INTIMAL in a long-distance improvisation between the cities of Oslo, Barcelona and London in May 2019. This improvisation was performed by nine Colombian migrant women, who had been involved in a research process using the Deep Listening® practice developed by Pauline Oliveros. Here we describe the performance setting and the implementation of the first two interfaces of the system: MEMENTO, an “embodied” navigator of an oral archive of Colombian women’s testimonies of conflict and migration; and RESPIRO, a sonification system that transmits and sonifies live, breathing signals between distant locations. We reflect on how the two interfaces facilitated and challenged the improvisers’ listening experiences and connections.

INTIMAL is a physical virtual embodied system for relational listening that integrates body movement, oral archives, and voice expression through telematic improvisatory performance in migratory contexts. It has been informed by nine Colombian migrant women who express their migratory journeys through free body movement, voice and spoken word improvisation. These improvisations have been recorded using Motion Capture, in order to develop interfaces for co-located and telematic interactions for the sharing of narratives of migration. In this paper, using data from the Motion Capture experiments, we are exploring two specific movements from improvisers: displacements on space (walking, rotating), and breathing data. Here we envision how co-relations between walking and breathing, might be further studied to implement interfaces that help the making of connections between place, and the feeling of presence for people in-between distant locations.

This paper describes a multidisciplinary encounter with oral testimony archives and their incorporation in the artistic research project INTIMAL. It explores ways in which to creatively listen to stories which might be emotionally challenging, and to create and sustain empathy with these disembodied voices, which contain a shared history as fissures of sixty years of violence.

This paper articulates the design for the first stage of INTIMAL: a physical/virtual embodied interactive system for relational listening in the context of human migration, set within the artistic practice of improvisatory telematic sonic performance. Informed by the Deep Listening experiences of nine Colombian migrant women in Europe and integrating Embodied Music Cognition Methods, INTIMAL draws upon sensorial experience in dreams, virtual spaces, and physical spaces to develop a holistic understanding of the body as an interface that keeps one's memory of place. Technologies are intended to be used as mediations aiding the co-relations in listening for the sensing, processing and retrieval of an oral archive of other women's testimonies from the Colombian civil war, while improvisers' body movements, voices, and spoken words resonate with these voices. The author suggests how INTIMAL system could act as catalyst for creating new layers in the reconstruction and transformation of embodied memory, opening paths for individual and collective healing of feelings associated to the migratory experience and the armed conflict.

Since 2012 I compose telematic sonic performances using long-distance bi-directional transmission of sound through the Internet: a mediation that strengthens metaphors of migration and dislocation. I am interested in the situations of connection and disconnection that are created and in the ‘in-between’ sonic spaces, which defy predictability. In the performances, geographical migrants participate as well as other people with interest in the experience of cultural dis-location. I invite them to work with spoken word and vocal expression and pre-recorded or acoustic sounds, as driving forces for their exchange. With this work my intention is the exploration of sonic spaces that support the search for sense of place, healing the contradictory feelings associated with the migratory experience. Here, I am reflecting on this creative process, and the aesthetics produced as the result of the interactions between people, through improvisatory sound practice when listening and performing in the distance, and the mediation of networking technologies.

This chapter situates my creative process as provoking expressions that make audible the individual and collective negotiations and connections between distant locations within urban mobility contexts and geographical migrations. It highlights my interest in creating technological mediated frameworks that aid individual and collective expressions for the emergence of narratives of interstitial spaces. In the book, the chapter contributes to a dialogue within the international environmental sound art movement.
About this book:
Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes.
This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving.

This paper re-visits my creative and research experiences with the creation of sound-driven interfaces for navigation and performance, as part of a personal quest for space and identity. Involving geographical migration, its sonic experience and the connections mediated with internet technologies, the experience of listening and performing within dislocation refers not only to the development of technological systems, but also to the exploration of new forms of interacting with the self and others through listening and sounding in distant locations, inviting participants to the discovery of ‘in-between’ sonic spaces for being.
Derived from the need for a shared conceptual and technical framework, the project ‘Sound Matters Framework’ has explored, with other sound artists and researchers, practices of interrogation and relational playback for the creative interplay of field recordings and speech. The framework has evolved into the idea of creating interfaces for relational listening. What characteristics might be involved in such imagined interfaces and what relational listening means within contemporary contexts of dislocation, are the questions that I am formulating on this paper within the broader field of
live interfaces. Pag 109-115 in Proceedings International Live Interfaces Conference 2016

Two internet-based sonic performances, Letters and Bridges (between Leicester
and Mexico City), and Migratory Dreams (between London and Bogotá), were developed
by the artist with the leading question of what the ‘in-between’ space
(Bhaba 1994; Ortega 2008) sounds like in the context of migration. Drawing on a
Deep Listening (Oliveros 2005) practice, the artist undertook pre-performance workshops
as a way to engage participants in the possibilities of travelling in time and
space, and expressing through voice and other sounds feelings that arise when they
migrate. The sharing of these sounds through the Internet in real time opened the
idea of territory and allowed participants to express feelings towards place, identity
and belonging, and to create mixed-reality narratives, within a supportive sound
space free from geographical and cultural constraints. High quality bi-directional
streaming audio software such as SoundJack and Tube Plug were used, adapted to
the performance needs. This paper describes the process of the creation of each performance,
considering its sonic, narrative, mediatised and performative aspects, offering
a reflection on new auditoriums created for migrants’ expression of their experiences
in the ‘in-between’. It argues that this specific approach helps migrants to
expand their sense of space and develop an awareness of their multidimensional
condition through sound.

Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as selected by commuters, as meaningful moments of sound from their commuting routine. Designed as a navigation structure, the environment draws on identifiable architectonic spaces such as entrances and corridors, but also incorporates more abstract ‘spaces’ based on memorable sounds that passengers had in common. The creation of the environment focused on the perception of social, political and symbolic experiences, and was derived from an iterative ethnographic and artistic practice which involved self-reflection, interviews, recordings of and listening to the journeys, and commuters' selections of sounds. This article describes the process of creation through the abstraction of a physical space, as well as the responses the work has evoked in the users and the academic community. It exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of practice-based research involving the creative use of digital technologies.

This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation 'Listening and Remembering', a performance for four commuters using voices and sounds from the Mexico City and Paris metros. It addresses the question: how can an act of collective remembering, inspired by listening to metro soundscapes, lead to the creation of networked voice- and sound-based narratives about the urban commuting experience? The networked experience is seen here from the structural perspective (telematic setting), the sonic underground context, the ethnographic process that led to the performance, the narratives that are created in the electro-acoustic setting, the shared acoustic environments that those creations suggest, and the technical features and participants' responses that prevent or facilitate interaction. Emphasis is placed on the participants' status as non-performers, and on their familiarity with the sonic environment, as a context that allows the participation of non-musicians in the making of music through telematically shared interfaces, using soundscape and real-time voice. Participants re-enact their routine experience through a dialogical relation- ship with the sounds, the other participants, themselves, and the experience of sharing: a collective memory.

In 1997 the creation of a virtual underground was somehow a bizarre idea that the author attempted to realize. First, the representation of metaphors of a metro in a multimedia format opened ideas of what could be possible to achieve on the Internet, e.g. how sound fragments uploaded by different people could run on the same navigational interface and what this mixture is telling us about our urban culture. How does it sound?

Listening was the practice selected to perceive the whole of space and time relationships within a journey, and how these resonate with each individual. First in London, and later interconnecting the experience with Mexico and Paris, the author followed a mixed ethnographic method with commuters in each city, involving them in reflective and performative listening practices.

Sounding Underground is the resulting interface that links the three cities’ metros, along with their cultures, evoking social, symbolic and political perceptions for each listener. The process followed by participants, and the interaction with the environment by users on the Internet, have opened paths for the acknowledgement and transformation of this experience, as each underground sonic journey becomes potentially a metaphor of a commuter’s life.