This is an Online Exposition of the PhD thesis The Ephemeral City, an intermedia site, structured around a map of Stockholm. The main content of this exposition is contained in the Repository of Music and Sound works with all relevant media files and notes. Taken together, all the works of this project form an imaginary city, and the exposition invites the reader to explore these materials, as if they were walking in that city. The written thesis can be downloaded as a pdf below, and the bibliography of the exposition is the same as that which is in the thesis.
The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the cityscape. The aim is to empower urban dwellers with another kind of ownership of their city.
The materials in the project are drawn around themes of urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening.
There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever-transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties, centering around a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound, utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs, string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa or violin, and sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to illuminate the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–The Ephemeral City–in order to argue that this evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers through force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life.
You are Here (Click to go to Repository of Music and Sound Works the Abstract and Thesis pdf):
Abstract and Thesis pdf Map of Stockholm Repository of Music and Sound Works
