Preparation
Bring your smartphon and
your own headphones or earphones.
Silent Walk is an audience participation program that adopts "soundwalking" as a method of exploring the times and spaces associated with ARKO Art Center. Based on the physical experiences of listening and walking, soundwalking helps us discover hidden aspects of the environments and the historical and social situations that surround us - yet tend to be ignored. Museum Groove is a new work created by the artist duo SEOM: for Silent Walk, an audience participation program linked to the exhibition Memory/Space, which explores the soundscapes. It consists of a workshop, sound tracks, and a map with a soundwalking route and directions. The workshop is to be held over a two-day period during the exhibition, with 10 people per session joining the members of SEOM: in walking around ARKO Art Center while listening, remembering, and experiencing. SEOM:'s sound map can be downloaded via QR code in the Center's gallery. With the map's guidance, viewers can also explore the Center's surrounding sound environment on their own.
MUSEUM GROOVE
The common meaning of "groove" is a small track such as the ones used to record sounds onto records. Sounds are created as the phonograph's needle vibrates inside the groove's narrow space. The members of SEOM: raise listeners' awareness of the potential sounds in space as they walk together along ARKO Art Center's grooves. Museum Groove includes sound tracks on themes such as past incidents related to the Center, a montage of the space's physical characteristics, and the invisible flows that surround the Center. Following around with SEOM:'s grooves, the viewer hears ARKO Art Center's story by way of the space's soundscape.
For this “soundwalking” activity,
follow the numbers on the map in sequence.
Try not to speak or make noise
while soundwalking.
As you reach each point,
follow the directions below
to explore the sounds.
Waiting
The first sound track begins at the corner
by the (former) ticket booth outdoors
on the first floor.
As the track finishes,
remove your earphones/headset
and focus briefly on the present sounds.
Waiting, the first track in Museum Groove, offers warm-up sounds for participants who are having their first experience with soundwalking (listening in an open environment). In order of their arrival at the workshop, they put on a headset and continue adapting to listening until all the participants have assembled. "Waiting" adopts the motif of a public telephone that appears in an old photo taken at ARKO Art Center. The writing that remains on the Center's wall is also evidence that a public telephone was once here. Listening to a soundscape reconstructed from the sounds that might have been present around the telephone at the time, participants experience moments of intersection in the same act - waiting their turn and listening at different times in the same setting.
Caption: Opening Project 2013
The second sound track should be listened to
in the outdoor lobby on the first floor.
This track recalls "Opening Project," which was realized in this setting 10 years ago and which left behind a result that is still visible today. That result is the space where the wall has been dismantled at the rear of the outdoor area on the Center's first floor. Without any information about the project or a caption listing the names of those who carried it out, the space might seem as though it has always been empty, and the viewers would have no real way of knowing it was the result of an art project. "Opening Project" was designed by five team members (Gu Bobae, Kim Jiyeon, Kim Socheol, Lee Charo, and Chung Jaeyeon) recruited through an ARKO Art Center "public art open call audition" in 2012, representing specialties in art, planning, architecture, and landscaping. It resulted in the dismantling of a wall measuring around 2.7 meters high and eight meters long at the center of the back border.
Closely examining the background situation that had necessitated the wall's construction, the project team attempted to develop different discourses on questions such as who the subjects of public institutions are and how "public service" can be defined. The project's result was the restoration of the external space on the first floor to the kind of open design in architect Kim Swoogeun's original design. Strictly speaking, this was not actually a "restoration," since the design was never built in the first place; at the same time, it can be viewed as a restoration in the sense that the architect's original vision was restored. The outdoor piloti space on the Center's first floor connects with Daehak-ro Road and Marronnier Park, reflecting the architect's aim of making ARKO Art Center into an intimate cultural setting. The track Caption: Opening Project 2013 offers a reconstruction based on audio from an archival film and a brick from the dismantled wall that artist Chung Jaeyeon (one of the "Opening Project" participants) has kept in storage all this time. Through temporary captions in sound, it kicks off the Museum Groove soundwalking experience by calling forth the spatial memories inscribed on the Center.
Hidden Track: Rooftop Garden
"Rooftop Garden" refers to the garden design indicated on the Center's design plan. Normally, the Center's roof is not open to the public, but it has been specially opened for the two Silent Walk sessions. In that sense, it represents a literal hidden track. Participants in the Silent Walk workshop open their ears to listen to the surrounding soundscape on the Center's roof. For three minutes, they close their eyes and focus on the sounds radiating in from around their body.
Sound Drawing in the Rooftop Garden on May 6, 2023.
Sound Drawing in the Rooftop Garden on July 1, 2023.
* The rooftop garden is only open on workshop dates.
Pause: Gallery 1
The space from the outdoor area
to the first-floor gallery
is for listening to changes in the soundscape.
Remove your earphones/headset,
step inside the gallery,
and focus on the sounds.
Arriving from the open outdoor space to the closed inner space of the gallery, participants focus on the changes in the sounds. In the process, they discover the Center's "keynote sounds": those that connect with external sounds, sounds that are closed off, and sounds that relate to the Center's contexts, among others. R. Murray Schafer, the first person to formulate the "soundscape" concept, defined the keynote sound as a sound that "identifies the key or tonality of a particular composition." In soundscapes, the keynote sounds of a particular space exist all around and are deeply ingrained in the people who live there.
*During the workshop, participants experience an amplified soundscape between the rooftop garden and Gallery 1 as they use their headsets and audio equipment.
Landscape without Light
Before opening the door
to the second-floor staircase,
put your earphones/headset back
on and play the sound track.
Landscape without Light is an imaginary soundscape in which SEOM: captures the odd feeling of the staircase connecting the first- and second-floor galleries. The staircase that people encounter as soon as they open the door to proceed from the first-floor gallery to the second-floor one is enough to cause momentary confusion, as they wonder whether they are inside or outside the Center. This may have to do with the building's architectural characteristics: apart from the exhibition spaces, all the internal and external surfaces are formed with bricks. The ceiling pane in the staircase, which appears designed to allow light inside, has been obscured with black film. Thick darkness descends on a space where light should be shining down vertically from the ceiling. This, together with Landscape without Light, has the effect of increasing the air's density.
Sounding Body
The fifth sound track should be listened
to inside the second-floor gallery.
Sounding Body is a soundscape created by collecting and rearranging the sound events that occurred in the process of organizing the second-floor gallery space and setting up the artwork. As they listen to the track Sounding Body, participants encounter sounds from an exhibition creation process that viewers do not typically experience. The term "sounding body" refers to something that creates vibrations to produce sound; more broadly, it means something that transforms or contains sound. As they listen to the reconfigured soundscape, soundwalking participants replace the artwork and exhibition spaces with sounding bodies.
Poetry of light an Brick
Listen to the sounds
while observing the shadows and bricks
that adorn the wall on the sloping road
outside the Center.
The Poetry of Light and Brick sound track interprets the brick designs on the sloping outdoor road as a graphic score. SEOM: spent many days observing ARKO Art Center while sitting in a coffee shop across the street from it. The shadows of the bricks appeared more defined on clear days, and on days when the artists were able to go up the sloping road (which is normally closed off), the projections on the surface as seen from below revealed the Center's textures as they cut the sky into reddish-brown pieces. Based on the imagined sounds of light on brick as the artists observed the shadows of the wall on intensely sunny days, Poetry of Light and Brick draws out the potential sounds of ARKO Art Center, which flow neatly like the sounds of an orgel disk.
*Workshop participants listen to the sounds as they walk with SEOM: along the sloping outdoor road.
Score of Poetry of light an Brick
Breath
Remove your earphones/headset,
sit down on a bench
in front of ARKO Art Center,
close your eyes, and focus
for one minute on the present sounds.
After a minute has passed,
put your earphones/headset back
on and listen to the seventh sound.
The sound track Breath represents the invisible flows of the Daehak-ro Road area at the time ARKO Art Center was built. An exhibition space operated since 1974 under the name "Misul Hoegwan" (Art Center), it acquired a new home with its 1979 relocation to what is now Seoul's Dongsung-gil Road. It is no coincidence that the outdoor space on its first floor has Naksan Mountain to the east and the palaces of Changgyeonggung and Gyeongbokgung to the west. Viewing this as part of the tradition of the metaphysical concept of jeonggi (vitality) based on the principles of feng shui, which regards the places associated with life as having breath like organisms, the members of SEOM: used sound to show the flows that continue through the Center. As they sit across from the building on benches in Marronnier Park, the soundwalkers conclude Museum Groove by listening to the track Breath, which flows west from Naksan Mountain past the Center's grooves and on around the walking visitors.
Copyright 2023. SEOM: Co. all rights reserved.