arphield recordings in glowlab
paula roush, arphield recordings, tagged exhibition, space media art, london 2006
this is the text on arphield recordings published in glowlab Issue 11. this issue examines “the presence of surveillance within public space, and the ways in which ubiquitous technologies, such as electronic tags, global positioning systems, SMS messaging, and other locative media are informing the ways in which we interact within urban environments. Artists utilize these technologies to create mobile orchestras, jam turnstiles, observe the observers, and put the means and the media of production into the hands of ordinary citizens. This issue also includes independent curator Anuradha Vikram’s review of Psychogeography by Merlin Coverly. ”
Arphield Recordings is a project documenting impromptu arphid sound performances produced by people scanning their oysters cards in their daily routines of accessing London tube stations.
Arphield Recordings is a project documenting impromptu arphid sound performances produced by people scanning their oysters cards in their daily routines of accessing London tube stations. The methodology of field recordings (documentation of site-specific soundscapes through audio recording equipment) is, in this case, focused on the sampling of sounds produced by the use of arphid (rfid) technology (cards and readers) complemented by digital processing. The sounds are sampled and synthesized, transforming the convergence of arphid tags and readers into an endless symphony of sound surveillance and compliance.
The project started with the idea for an arphid mob, created by inviting friends to join me at a designated tube station for a semi-choreographed sound jam using our oyster cards. Because of the heavy security at all the gates, I decided to do make some observations to determine the best time and location for the mob. Observing the familiar tube’s access control gates, initially with no equipment and later with a camcorder, I realized that people were already engaging in impromptu sound performance. My documentation led me to discern varied patterns and even participatory scores, with mass arphid-soundscapes punctuated by silences, glitches and cracks in the system, all warped up in a circadian rhythm of work-rush hours.
The first arphield recordings - documenting the impromptu sound performance of people moving through the London tube access control gates were done in Brixton, Kings Cross and Caledonian Road tube stations during March 2006 for the TAGGED one day event at SPACE Media Arts (NodeLondon March 2006), and CDs with the tracks and locational tags were distributed. The second arphield recordings - the stockwell sound jam memorial, happened on Saturday 10th of June 2006 when people in London were invited to gather in the Stockwell tube station and scan their oyster card for 30-second sync periods accompanied by a podcast of pre-recorded oyster beep tracks.
The third arphield recordings - the oldstreet arphield gatecrash - took place on Saturday 7th of October, 2006, when participants were invited to download oldstreet.mp3 to a portable music player and to follow a detailed set of instructions and gestures which resulted in the participant crashing the system.
The project remains open to contributions. One way of doing this is downloading the arphield recordings and visiting the station gates with the sounds on a portable music player to experience a mix of live and prerecorded oyster beeps. Another way of participating is by contributing arphield recordings from a tube station’s access control gate. You can do this by opening an odeo.com account and uploading your recordings, tagging them as arphieldRecording followed by the number unique to your oyster card (as in arphieldRecordings-0503266130-03).
Arphield Recordings was conceived as a probe into the practice of sousveillance and a more general understanding of the arphid surveillance/equivalence of public space and transport. It also foregrounds itself into the field of networked performance and possible notions of community, interaction, and connectedness among participants. The emerging field of personal sousveillance - the capture, processing, storage, retrieval, and transmission of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity (i.e. personal experience capture) using camera phones, and wearables has been mainly focused on the visual as can be observed in the dominance of weblogs as photo- and video-blogs. Surveillance studies have given prominence to the visual as well. However, as Michael Bull and Les Black write in their introduction to the Auditory Culture Reader: (2003) “The history of surveillance is as much about a sound history as a history of vision… we need a sound history of surveillance… the polyphony of sounds increasingly regulates and is regulated by us.”
“Eavesdropping, censorship, recording, and surveillance are weapons of power,” writes Jacques Attali, (1985) “…The technology of listening is on, ordering, transmitting, and recording noise is at the heart of this apparatus…who among us is free of the feeling that this process, taken to an extreme, is turning the modern state into a gigantic, monopolizing noise emitter, and at the same time, a generalized eavesdropping device.”
Urban field recordings and their manipulation have a long-standing history: Pierre Shaeffer’s ‘Etude aux chemins de ferre’ (1948) is the first example of musique concrete, which employed a variety of manipulation techniques which led him to define it as a sound-work rather than music. In the electronic age, collaged and assembled field recordings can include dialtones (Golan Levin) or data noise (Ryoji Ikeda).
In Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music In A Complex Age, (2005) David Borgo positions music-sound as an excellent site for the study of sync in performance and in the dynamics that shape a musical community. “Coordinated rhythmic activity”, crucial to social life as “muscular unison” or “collective bonding” are as much at play in improvised musicking as when people are moving through the arphid gates. Both activities involve a shared sonic experience, where group interaction enables synchronicity, an underlying modulation between sync and swarm, and order and chaos, mediated by the network.
Several studies have described the ordinary experience of moving through the city with mobile sound devices, such as walkmans, car radios and iPods, and how new sonic territories are created in the course of these journeys. Similarly, the experience of public space is transformed as users move through the stations with their oyster cards: the daily routine of city walking/journeying sounding is articulated through the beeping of several electronic devices as oyster card users engage with sound technology.
The oyster card has an added layer due to the arphid’s identity features. The processes involved include: (1) the registration of the card with one’s id and a product identifier (unlike the barcode, the unique id number inserts one into a traceable network that can map one in space/time). Id technologies, such as passports, national id cards, have been designed to facilitate identification by binding identity to the body, by associating w/ other identifiers such as the name, address, signature, but crucially arphids bind the body to a unique identification number, that will be associated with a database allowing for all sorts of correlations between data and other personal/social identifiers to be made.
The second step (2) is connected to ‘topophonic knots’ (Paul Thibauld), the interference point between media listening (in this case also sound-producing) and architectural space is the one of access which leads us to think of the traveling space as one of doors (bus), gates (tube/trains), with the transition from the motion of walking into the one of being transported; the gates of the tube station or the readers inside the bus are sonic doors or outposts, intermediary between two ways of traveling the city in the case of the tube even more accentuated by the shift in verticality from the underground space into the street level. Also the space where regulation is more visible and the identification of the body becomes audible and thus public and de/re/territorialized.
Currently, arphid became almost synonymous with the internet of things and with ubiquitous computing, with its tendencies to use centralized proprietary systems, sharing information between authoritarian structures of commerce, policing and control but creating a form of segregation that excludes the surveilled from access to this data. A position one can take now is to expand or enlarge on current studies of surveillance. On one hand, metaphors that describe our current state of surveillance as panopticon are well established and there is also an acknowledgment that people are starting to use panopticist tools for playful, entertainment and tactical purposes. On the other hand, unlike surveillance that isolates and disconnects, there is a feeling that today’s personal sousveillance technologies like camera phones and weblogs might help to connect and build networks or a sense of community. Crucially, equiveillance - the balance between surveillance and sousveillance - which allows the individual to construct their own case from evidence they gather themselves, rather than being subjected to surveillance data that could possibly incriminate them, remains a viable road.
For example, one of the most disputed events following the 7/7 attack, related to the murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in the Stockwell tube station is the narrative surrounding the use of oyster card by Jean Charles and whether he jumped over the ticket barrier running down the escalator to jump onto the train. This was registered in the post-mortem report, but later the police briefed the family that he had actually used the travel card to pass through. According to the leaked IPCC documents, Menezes passed through the barrier normally using his pre-paid Oyster card. Police initially refused to release CCTV footage while the IPCC investigation was ongoing, even to the family. It had been suggested that the man reported by eyewitnesses as jumping over the barrier, might have been one of the police officers in pursuit. Even more chilling than this slippage, is the fact that such technology is already in place that allows for the tracing of public transport users throughout the city as a centralized database to which its subjects cannot themselves have access.
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