Cluster

The Art of Walking / Footage of Resistance, Soundscape of Care: Audio walking in/with (E)motion Pictures

By Ellen Y. Chang
Participant of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss) walks through the Medicinal Herb Garden at the University of Washington. Courtesy of the author.

At 4 A.M. on March 24 of 2014, Taiwan’s democracy was plunged into darkness as protesters endured brutal treatment by the authorities.1 The scene of demonstrators being assaulted by water cannons was etched into social media and newspapers. A haunting full-page New York Times advertisement, “Democracy at 4 am,” graphically encapsulated the relentless crackdown by law enforcement with three matchbox-sized black-and-white images.2 Following the violent suppression, the student-led Sunflower Movement in Taiwan bloomed in forty-nine cities across twenty-one countries, culminating in a global 24-hour rally, a synchronized show of solidarity, organized by overseas Taiwanese students and expatriates.3

Walking among the protesters in New York City, rather than in Taiwan, stirred conflicting emotions within me. Witnessing the unrest predominantly through online platforms and (audio)visual media sources intensified my sense of disconnect. Amidst this turmoil, a compelling desire to march with the protesters back home and bridge the gap between the street movements in Taiwan and my mediated experiences of it led to the creation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss) (Ellen Chang, 2018) at the University of Washington’s Medicinal Herb Garden. This project, through the act(ivity) of audio walking, delves into the intersection of (audio)visual media and social activism, viewed through the distance of diaspora.

Drawing inspiration from the innovative work of Canadian sound artist Janet Cardiff, Untitled Vignettes reshapes Cardiff’s approach to integrating photographic images with audio walk. While building upon Cardiff’s method of unearthing histories embedded in her chosen sites, my audio walk navigates diverse historical landscapes to bridge distant geographical spaces by grounding individual bodies and experiences through the nature of walking. Untitled Vignettes embarks on an immersive journey, in which each step taken in Seattle intertwines with the footprints of social movements in Taiwan. Within this interdimensional journey, walking becomes a collaborative mode of reinterpreting and reimaging the garden’s space (Figure 1).4 Braiding together reality, virtuality, imagination, and memories, this procession through the garden transforms the garden into an audiovisual palimpsest formed by what Giuliana Bruno terms “(e)motion pictures” that retell the narratives of Taiwan’s resistance against social injustices and threads a tangible connection between myself and my homeland.5

Figure 1. Walking map for Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss). Courtesy of the author.

Like partners walking together, engaging in audio walking with the (audio)visual cues from the soundtrack and photographic images affectively restages the site of the garden by fostering a deep sense of self-awareness and embracing a hypersensitivity to time and place. The convergence of movement and (audio)visual technologies charts a course through the intertwined realms of (audio)visual storytelling and multisensory exploration. Collectively, through the medium of audio walking, we craft a chorus of voices, sounds, and noises that challenges established power structures and offers a gateway to re-envision our world. It also materializes infrastructures of care by merging the moving worlds articulated through these (audio)visual mediums and the rich tapestry of multisensory experiences they invoke (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Audio excerpt from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), layered with photo number 1 of the audio walk held against the University of Washington Drumheller Fountain in a distance. Photo number 1 is a film still from Cannot Live Without You (Leon Dai, 2009). Courtesy of the author.

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RE-ROOT: Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss)

Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss) is a site-specific audio walk centered around the theme of displacement caused by misleading policies that falsely promise a better future against the backdrop of Taiwan’s long-contested (post)coloniality and its quest for a collective sovereign identity.6 It seamlessly blends spontaneous reflection with historical narratives, personal recollection, music, cinematic soundtracks, and local soundscapes. This project transforms my digital encounters with the societal turmoil in Taiwan into an interdimensional experience through a series of (audio)visual storytelling, listening, and viewing. To fully engage with the effect of Untitled Vignettes within the framework of this cluster, the Figures—a script, a photographic image, an (audio)visual excerpt, or a combination of them—are intended to be experienced sequentially alongside the written narrative as presented in this piece. Through the mode of walking with (audio)visual technologies, particularly cameras and the sounds and images they capture, whether still or in motion, how can we reshape sensorial experiences of sight, sound, smell, and even touch as a means to create an affective site where we can form our own relationships with the moving worlds unfolding before our eyes and ears (Figure 3)?

Figure 3. On the left is an excerpt from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), showcasing photo number 4 of the audio walk and the University of Washington Medicinal Herb Garden. On the right is a video recording, taken on December 23, 2021, showing the author walking down the same spiral stairs captured in photo number 4 by Yu Cheng Sung in 2018.7 Excerpt and video recording provided by of the author. Music courtesy of Rock Records Co., Ltd.

Several events within the history of protest in 21st-century Taiwan bear on Untitled Vignettes. In the Summer of 2011, on the evening of July 10, a mic-pass protest concert known as Buyaogaobiedonghaian Xiariwanhui (Don’t say goodbye to the East Coast: Summer evening party) took place on Shanyuan Beach in Taitung County in Taiwan. The protest during the day, named Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyang (Thousands of people roar the ocean hand-in-hand), followed a month-long community-based art intervention involving songwriting, pop-up protest performance, and installation. The microphone was passed from one Indigenous singer to another; from one audience to another; from one activist to another; and from one protester to another. Blurring the boundary between the stage and the audience were the white sands on the beach; the sound of the oceanic tide; and the circular dancing around the singing party that was inspired by traditional Indigenous harvest festivals. This day-long collective singing and dancing was interwoven with a traditional Indigenous land blessing ceremony, protest performance, and the Indigenous ritual of igniting smoke signals. It mobilized a remote Indigenous tribe that reclaimed the beach, albeit only momentarily, and made home again at the site of the protest occupation, which was once part of the Indigenous traditional territories. 

At the Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyang protest, Indigenous Paiwan musicians MATZKA lent their voice to the protest by improvising their own Reggae version of the phrase, houhaiyang (roar the ocean). MATZKA’s houhaiyang, conveying the Indigenous community’s connection to their ancestral lands and resonating with broader environmental concerns, carries on the wavelength of “o-hai-yan” (oh ocean) that has lingered since Indigenous Pinuyumayan activist-singer Pau-dull Chen Jiannai sang the “Taibalang Folksong” with Indigenous Puyuma-Amis activist-singer-songwriter Panai Kusui at their unplugged concert, Yongshi yu daosui (warrior and rice plant), 15 years ago (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Excerpt from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), featuring photo number 6 of the audio walk layered over the University of Washington Rainier Vista. Photo number 6 is a screenshot from “Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyang” (Thousands of people roar the ocean hand-in-hand) that captures the Beautiful Bay Resort BOT Construction Project on Shanyuan Beach in Taitung County in Taiwan. Courtesy of the author.

Five years after the Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyang occupation in 2011, President Tsai Ing-wen assumed office on May 20, 2016.8 On the morning of August 1, 2016, President Tsai issued a public apology to the Indigenous Peoples of Taiwan on behalf of the Taiwan government for the centuries of pain and mistreatment endured by the Indigenous community. The ceremony, held at the Presidential Office Building and live-streamed on YouTube, unfolded in a similar fashion to the Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyangoccupation five years before: a shouting ritual to call upon all Indigenous Peoples; burnt millet stalks to guide the ancestral spirits to the ceremony; a traditional Bunun prayer rite to commence the ceremony; and a joint prayer to ask the ancestral spirits to bear witness to the ceremony.9 Despite these similarities, a notable disparity emerged. The camera that swiveled in the sky and later shuffled between long and close-up shots indoors exposed the uneven power dynamics between the President and Indigenous delegates, starkly contrasted to the egalitarian power relation among the protestors at the Qianrenqianshou Houhaiyang protest on the beach.

In 2022, on the 1,884 days of the yuanzhuan xiaojiaoshi (Indigenous transitional justice classroom) occupation at the 228 Peace Memorial Park—an occupation arising from the Indigenous Ketagalan Boulevard Protest since February 2017 that advocates for greater official recognition of Indigenous traditional lands—Panai expressed to the press her disappointment with the Tsai administration: “President Tsai launched the Indigenous transitional justice [initiative] . . . but she quickly veered off course.”10 Panai’s sentiment resonates with political scientist Naiteh Wu’s critique of Taiwan’s transitional justice as “transition without justice, or justice without history.”11 A warning from the Taipei City Government in the name of yifahsingcheng (acting in accordance with the law) forced Panai to relocate, for the fifth time, the tent of the yuanzhuan xiaojiaoshi, which has been dubbed the kaidao buluo (Katagalan Boulevard tribe) after the protesters associated their presence at the performance relay with their everyday visit to a mobile Indigenous tribe.12 Panai’s refusal to move is an explicit accusation against the government’s incessant infringement on Indigenous land rights and a firm rejection of perpetuating such unjust, exploitative cycles.

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RE-MAP: from virtually navigating the cyberspace to physically walking in the garden

Figure 5. Script excerpt of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss). Courtesy of the author.
Figure 6. Edited excerpt from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), in which photo number 3 of the audio walk lays over the grounds of the University of Washington Medicinal Herb Garden. Photo number 3 is a press image from Newstalk showing a bulldozer tearing down Chang-Yao-Fang in Miaoli, Taiwan, on July 18, 2013.13 Courtesy of the author.

“Yifahsingcheng, gongpingchengyi” (acting in accordance with the law; guaranteed fairness and justice) is a standard response from government officials when promises of building dreams sour into nightmares of homes being torn down (Figures 5 and 6). Untitled Vignettes uses audiovisual palimpsests to displace Taiwanese land use issues onto the unceded Salish territory occupied by the University of Washington, reimagining the medicinal herb garden an “emotive site” to germinate opportunities to explore, build, and confront the connections and tensions that shape and reshape my diasporic experience.14 Unfolding multiple perspectives to navigate the complexities of defining home and grappling with the nuances of losing one’s sense of belonging, the emotional re-mapping of an (audio)visual archive through audio walking in the garden seeks to “counteract the loss of memory inherent in any form of historization” by melding the acts of walking, listening, and viewing onto the landscape and soundscape of the garden.15

Emerging through the practice of audio walking, the various mediated connections to the different homes—the home of the audio walk; the homes of memories and histories elsewhere; and the homes of the (audio)visual creations—reveal the diasporic experience shaped by this distinct mode of encounter, as it dwells in its preoccupation with mediated, if not missed, moments of encounter. By weaving unfamiliar memories with the native histories of the medicinal herb garden, we not only convert those emotionally laden memories into imagination but also further enact recollection. Eliciting “involuntary memories” through the palpable experience of space, walking alongside a recorded soundtrack—an audio timeline intertwining the voiceover of Untitled Vignettes with our own inner voices, alongside the ambient soundscapes of different locations and times—further provides a method for creating “virtual spaces” for preserving those different layers of memories.16 We enter a new world with at least two acoustic spaces that seemingly blend reality with recordings. Bonding movement to emotion, the virtual recorded soundscape unfolds in real-time, one step after another, through which we find a way to be in multiple places and temporalities at once, emotionally and multisensorially.17

My mediated encounter with those protest scenes was broken down into fragments of personal memories and event snapshots to form a hybrid timeline for the virtual soundscape. A map, a set of photographic images, and an audio recording were created as portals to connect and merge the different layers of time and space along the itinerary. Everything in the walk unfolds in the present tense as we make our way through the garden. The playback of the recorded past—comprising memories, soundscapes, voiceovers—invites us to synchronize various episodes of recorded experiences with our own current auditory surroundings, spontaneous recollections, and the physical world around us. The space gradually reveals itself as we walk, and, from our moving perspective, an imaginative journey also unfolds.

In Untitled Vignettes, every experience, every moment of encounter, presents an opportunity to form connections and create a sense of solidarity. Shaped by the recorded sounds of the walk as a conduit for embedding memories and facilitating emotional access to knowledge, the new soundscape transforms into an “acoustic intervention.”18 Combined with the act of walking, this intervention takes on an embodied form, as we find ourselves expanding our horizons and  sensitizing ourselves to the subtle layers of reality belonging to the activism afar. Tapping into the “audible world of invisibility,” the embodied intervention in the form of audio walking produces its own peculiar architectures and virtual spaces of networks, belongings, memories, and solidarity.19

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RE-FRAME: from audio walking to cinematic sight-seeing

Amidst the peak of the pandemic in 2020, a New York Times article coined the term, “audio plays,” to describe what has been known as audio walks or sound walks—“outdoor, screen-free (as opposed to the Zoom meetings), participatory shows, but in a solitary and covert way.”20 Combined with memories akin to (e)motion pictures—a medium that not only “dwell[s] in motion” but also “‘moves’ us” emotionally through “its ability to render affects and, in turn, to affect”—printed on celluloid films that screen, much like staging, the virtual world to us, Untitled Vignettes, similarly, crafts a cinematic experience in broad daylight (Figures 7a and 7b).21 Completely transforming and affecting the location where our imaginations traverse, the sound collage, acting as a filmic soundscape for the real world, turns the garden into a physical cinema where “both audience and exhibits move.”22

Figure 7a (left). Screen capture from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), displaying photo number 2 of the audio walk overlaid on the path leading to the University of Washington Medicinal Herb Garden. Photo number 2 is a film still from The Great Buddha+ (Huang Hsin-Yao, 2017). Courtesy of the author.
Figure 7b (right). Screen capture from the video simulation of Untitled Vignettes (Soundscapes of Loss), in which section B of the University of Washington Medicinal Herb Garden is seen through photo number 5 of the audio walk. Photo number 5 features Liu Chen-Hsiang’s photograph, “Juhuatian” (Chrysanthemums field), from 2001.23 Courtesy of the author.

By infusing the garden with immersive soundscapes that sometimes coalesce and other times drift apart, Untitled Vignettesinterfaces affect and place, reminiscent of cinematic sight-seeing. While the full realization of the constructed time-space of multiple temporal and spatial layers may only be achieved through physically walking in the garden, it never completely fades away even after the soundtrack concludes. It lingers as an additional layer of time and space co-existing with the time-space in which we are physically situated. As we take off our headsets and return to our daily routine, our hearing becomes newly sensitized. Inhabited by the sounds and voices mobilized from the past, and the (e)motion pictures developed from the originally mediated experiences, the park now feels very different. 

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Endnotes

  1. “Democracy at 4 am,” New York Times, March 29, 2014, New York Edition, accessed February 20, 2020, https://4am.tw/download/4am for States Local NYT- BK version.pdf.
  2. A full-page advertisement titled “Democracy at 4 am” was published in the New York Times in print on March 29, 2014. The same advertisement also appeared in the International New York Times in print on March 31, 2014.
  3. During the spring of 2014, activists including college students and civic groups occupied the Legislative Yuan (Parliament) and the Executive Yuan (Cabinet Office) of Taiwan. They protested the Kuomintang (KMT) ruling party’s attempt to unilaterally ratify the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) with China without a clause-by-clause parliamentary review. The passing of the pro-China CSSTA, opening service industries such as banking, healthcare, tourism, film, telecommunication, and publishing to Chinese investments, activated cross-strait tensions between Taiwan and China that have existed since 1945, at the end of World War II when the exiled KMT regime from China began exercising jurisdiction over the main island of Taiwan and its outlying islands after the surrender of Japanese rule. This series of protests and occupations had many names associated with it, but became most widely known as the Sunflower Movement after March 19, 2014, when a florist brought over 1,300 sunflowers to the students who had occupied the Legislative Yuan building since the previous evening. This name also refers to the protestors’ use of the sunflower and its heliotropic characteristics as a symbol of hope.
  4. Janet Cardiff, The Walk Book (Vienna: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and the Public Art Fund, 2005), 91.
  5. Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007), 20, 6.
  6. The enduring legacy of colonialism in Taiwan over the past four hundred years, including European colonialism in the 17th century, Japanese Rule from 1895 to 1945, and subsequent control by the exiled KMT regime from China until 1987, continues to interrupt procedures of decolonization on the island, and consequently precludes the possibility of Taiwan’s postcoloniality. See Ching, Leo T. S, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
  7. Erratum for the voiceover: The urban renewal plan associated with the South Airport Village in Taipei, Taiwan, is still in progress as of May 7, 2024. The spiral stairs photographed on December 23, 2021, and the surrounding architectures are all still intact. 
  8. All Chinese names follow the Chinese convention with family name preceding the given name except when they are commonly referred to in the Western name order, such as Naiteh Wu.
  9. “President Tsai apologizes to Indigenous Peoples on behalf of government,” Office of the President, Republic of China (Taiwan), August 1, 2016, https://english.president.gov.tw/NEWS/4950.
  10. For Panai’s full speech and the news footage of the same name accompanying the article, visit Rung-Jing Wu, “Lusu yiqianbabaibashisitianhou zaizaoqugan—yuanzhuanxiaojiao shi: buzhengshiyuanminsuqiu bulikai” (Another expulsion after 1,884 days of occupation—Indigenous transitional justice classroom: no Indigenous transitional justice; no departure), Civilmedia @ Taiwan, March 16, 2022, https://www.civilmedia.tw/archives/109561.
  11. For the full account of Naiteh Wu’s critique on Taiwan’s path toward transitional justice, see Naiteh Wu, “Transition without Justice, or Justice without History: Transitional Justice in Taiwan,” Taiwan Journal of Democracy 1, no. 1 (July 2005): 77-102, https://doi:10.29654/TJD.200507.0004.
  12. The Indigenous Ketagalan Boulevard protest is an ongoing protest in Taiwan since February 2017. Taking place outside of the wall of the Taipei Guest House on Ketagalan Boulevard in Taipei, protestors plead for more official recognition of Indigenous traditional lands in the draft proposal for demarcating Indigenous traditional territories put out by the governmental Council of the Indigenous Peoples, which excludes private property from what is designated as Indigenous lands.
  13. Chia-Ying Wu, “Dapuangeng Ershenbaisu: Yuandichongjian Yaoyaowuqi” (Dapu Village’s Motion for New Trial Denied), Newtalk, April 16, 2016, https://newtalk.tw/news/view/2016-04-22/72456.
  14. Bruno, Public Intimacy, 21.
  15. Ibid., Public Intimacy, 6. See also Cardiff, The Walk Book, 13.
  16. Cardiff, The Walk Book, 234, 101.
  17. Bruno, Public Intimacy, 24.
  18. Cardiff, The Walk Book, 97.
  19. Ibid., 24.
  20. Alexis Soloski, “For These Shows, Take a Hike,” New York Times, September 11, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/theater/sound-walks-promenade-plays.html?smid=url-share.
  21. Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (London: Verso, 2002), 7.
  22. Bruno, Public Intimacy, 9.
  23. Liu, Chen-Hsiang, “Huishou juhuayexingjun shiwunian” (Fifteen Years of Night March of the Chrysanthemum), The Reporter, May 19, 2017, https://www.twreporter.org/a/photo-lin-sheng-xiang-20-years.

  • Ellen Y. Chang

    Ellen Y. Chang is a doctoral candidate in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington. Her dissertation, with an emphasis on Taiwan’s contemporary audiovisual landscapes and historiographies, examines the transactional encounter among contemporary Taiwanese video art/installation, cinema, and popular culture as processes of aesthetic decolonization. As both a film scholar and art curator/practitioner, she directs the Arts & Culture program for UW Taiwan Studies and teaches the “Made in Taiwan: Arts and Culture of Contemporary Taiwan” course series. Her work has received support from the Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship, Joseph and Yetta Blau Award for Excellence in Research, and the Chester Fritz International Research Fellowship from the University of Washington. She was the managing editor for Feminist Media Histories, and has organized the Body and Media Graduate Research Cluster and the Feminist Writing Graduate Research Cluster, both funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities.