Overview

Over the last two weeks Nick Krystal and I developed a soundwalk. Our main constraints were that the soundwalk should be located within our class building (370 Jay St) and be less than five minutes in length.

Choosing Location

Initially we wanted to focus on the elevators in the building. I’ve always been interested in spaces of transition (see Thoroughfare). Locating a soundwalk within an elevator also had a somewhat deconstructionist feel to it, as one wouldn’t actually do much walking within an elevator. However, we realized that the elevators in this building were simply too fast - it took about twenty seconds to reach the top floor of the building - and too unpredictable, as other people entering and exiting could throw off the timing of the elevator’s position by ten or twenty seconds at a time.

We discovered the basement of the building through the freight elevator, and pivoted to locating our soundwak on the first basement level of the building. This area had an intensely creepy feeling, the gloss and tile of a much older building left abandoned, holes in floors, construction equipment, and graffiti everywhere. We aimed to focus our soundwalk on the unique property of this space - the fact that it was simultaneously a space belonging to the past and the future of 370 Jay St. The audio of the soundwalk focuses on echoes of the past: train cars, as the building used to be a junction point for the MTA; electrical hums, as the building then and now is being marketed and modeled as the vanguard of Technology in Brooklyn; and ghostly, mechanical ambience.

We collected a series of primary sources describing the previous life of the building and assembled it into an accompanying packet of supplemental material. A map and directions for how to embark on the walk is also provided. You can download it here