Murmur project's cell phone art.
Toronto's murmur project creates cell phone installations.
City stories via cell phone in Toronto.
I hate it when people or groups insist on putting special punctuation into their names, but I like the idea of Toronto's murmur project so much that I'll grudgingly indulge them.
In a previous article I mentioned The Pedestrian Project's performance piece: a half-hour walk around town, guided (or disoriented) by cell phone.
[murmur] have a slightly different approach. They collect and record tiny snippets of city stories -- reminiscences about a building, a porch, a corner, a park bench -- and make each of them available by local phone call. Then they post a sign as close as they can get to the location, inviting everyone who's walking by to call in and listen to the story on the spot.
[murmur] was conceived and developed by Shawn Micallef, Gabe Sawhney and James Roussel, with help from the Canadian Film Centre's Habitat New Media Lab. Urban theorists will appreciate their debt to Situationism and to Walter Benjamin's flânerie; the rest of us nosey parkers will just appreciate the stories.
In a 2003 interview for Year Zero One, Micallef talks about his delight in "a real city full of nooks and crannies hiding all kinds of secrets." The stories are low-key little anecdotes, just the sort of thing a friend might point out if you were walking together down the street. Micallef goes on to explain: "For instance, if a person wants to tell a story about the park where they walk their dog everyday, and nothing more, it's not particularly interesting. But if they, in their story, demonstrate why that simple act of walking their dog has some huge meaning for them, well, it might be something other people want and even need to hear."
[murmur]'s first sites opened in 2003 in Toronto's Kensington Market. Within a year they'd developed sites in Vancouver's Chinatown, Montreal's Plateau, and other parts of Toronto -- all layered, interesting districts with busy sidewalks. In September 2005 they added a few Calgary locations as well.
If you're in any of those cities, make sure you have a phone with you, and watch for [murmur] signs that you're in a story zone.
You're really supposed to listen to these stories in situ, but if you're nowhere nearby you can at least get a sample. A few of the Toronto stories (Spadina, Kensington Market, and the Annex)can be heard from their website. (I lived for several years in Toronto, living and working in and around those areas, so listening to these sound clips was a nostalgic wallow for me.)
