The leading idea of this iteration was to explore an urban terrain "underneath" its signified presence—to carry out an inquiry into the signless, anonymous, and an-iconic city as a space of uncertainty, vulnerability, precariousness and interdependence. From this perspective, the urban environment might appear as open and unfinished, as a space to be signified in interaction with those who inhabit it. The signless city presents itself as its own process of becoming-in-interaction and thus as a framework for collective creative encounters.
The underpinning hypothesis is that phenomena emerge out of a proto-phenomenal horizon, that is, a dynamic sphere of not-yet consolidated significances, a pre-perceptual and thus pre-conceptual stream resulting from the interaction between subjectivities and their surroundings that not-yet enables the formation of distinctive meanings and forms but the emergence of sense.
In a continuous critical negotiation with this conceptual framework, this inquiry was realized through practices that enable the urban environment to appear devoid of pre-given and objectified significances, firstly for the researcher practicing them and secondly for the researchers joining this inquiry through the artifacts these practices produce. The first and preparatory practice was a practice of walking informed by specific actions of hearing and listening—an aurally informed walking practice—and based on practices of walking meditation. The function of this practice was to enable the environment to appear, at least incipiently, as signless or, to be more precise, to induce a variety of interaction between the practitioner and its surroundings that allows it to loose temporarily its stable and unquestioned appearance—its appearance as a given, and thus mind-independent, reality—and arise as its own process of emergence. According to the phenomenological-enactivist framework within which this iteration—and furthermore the whole project The sense of common self—develops, the function of this practice can be denominated "aesthetic epoché."
Once this preparatory practice accomplished its function, two different practices were performed iteratively: a practice of aurally informed exploratory essay writing and a practice of recording. The first practice produced the textual component of the essay presented though an "extended reading" within the above-mentioned conference. Pieces of the sound recordings were isolated and organized in order to configure the non-textual aural part of the essay.
For this exposition an new form of presentation of the essay has been produce by assembling a recording of a reading of the exploratory essay and the same pieces of sound recording displayed in the extended reading.
Whereas the preparatory practice described above can be consider as a means to accomplish an "aesthetic epoché," the extended reading as well as the essay presented here can be understood as artifacts (hopefully!) endowed with the agency of enabling "reduction" on a most primary and fundamental dimension consisting in the emergence of intuitive evidences.
Presented on May 23 2024 at the Hietsu Pavilion in Helsinki, in the framework of the conference City is sound, city is quicksand – voicing imaginaries and dissonances within the project City as Space of Rules and Dreams.
