Locative media sound walk distributed across the grounds of the Yokohama Baseball Stadium, Yokohama, Japan.Created specifically for and exhibited within the Dislocate Festival (www.dis-locate.net). Creation: 3 – 13th September 2008, exhibit: 13th – 21st.

Yokohama Baseball Stadium is a thirty thousand seat stadium that sits in the heart of the Naka-ward region of Yokohama between the city’s commercial centre and a densely populated residential district. The grounds surrounding the stadium are primarily there to accommodate queuing spectators entering the stadium through one of a number of gates. However, the grounds serve a number of sub-functions outside of accommodating spectators: the grounds are lined with trees and green belts, including a small pond and garden, which attract and appeal to, local walkers and leisure-seekers. The site also includes a children’s play area and commuters use the grounds as a short cut, avoiding the busy roads that surround the site. In addition, the site is home to a number of unanticipated groups such as taipo drum players, who congregate in the evenings to play and practice drums together and, less positively, homeless people who find board in the secluded recesses of the park.

In Hear, Out there: Yokohama placed onto the grounds of the stadium recordings captured in this site over the course of a three-week residency. These recordings document the various activities of the various social groups that I witnessed in the site over the course of my study. The work sought to bring its audience into actively attending to, and reflecting upon, the everyday location framed by the piece via an engagement with the site’s recorded image. Furthermore, through the presentation of the site’s many uses together in time, spatialised out across the site, the work allowed it’s audience to explore and compare these uses and in doing so arrive at a new understanding of the site, realising it to be a very particular type of place.

Video:Document of a locative sound project entitled “In Hear, Out there: Yokohama”. Sound is presented binaurally and represents that heard by a participant navigating through the Yokohama Stadium complex, Japan. The work utilised a mobile device with GPS capability.