Owen Chapman Charity Marsh Audio-Mobile: Record, Remix, (Re)search
Charity Marsh Public Presentation
Hip Hop as Methodology: The IMP Labs and Community Research
“To listen to hip hop is to enter a world of complexity and contradiction.” (Perry)
Over the past five years I have directed and developed numerous community hip hop arts-based projects in Saskatchewan, Canada. In turn I have argued that in spite of the problematic and often racialized and gendered representations associated with hip hop culture, hip hop programs have the potential to illustrate and facilitate the creative, thoughtful, and artistic subjectivities of Indigenous youth and, to challenge the dominant gendered, racialized and racist frameworks on which the media so often relies, when presenting stories on hip hop culture and Indigenous youth in Canada.
Transitioning away from the conventional approach of theorizing community-based arts projects as a discourse of intervention (i.e. targeting “at risk” youth), in this presentation I will demonstrate how hip hop community projects create a recognizable sense of place (Forman 2002; 2004), a connection to a global world (Mitchell 2001; Marsh 2009), meaningful arts practices of resistance (Perry 2004), and a powerful form of expression (Ntarangwi 2009) that makes sense for Indigenous youth attempting to create a space for themselves both in and outside of a colonial/ settler framework (Marsh 2009; 2011).
Drawing on the Scott Collegiate/IMP Labs Hip Hop Project as one example, I argue that for the students who have participated, hip hop has become one strategy for expressing and making sense of present-day lived experiences including ongoing legacies of state enforced residential school programs, traditional ideas of gender and family, the current climate of contentious government initiated truth and reconciliation processes, and systemic issues of racism, poverty, and violence faced by young Indigenous people today.Owen Chapman Workshop
Audio-Mobile: Field Recording and Remixing with Mobile Technologies
Mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, MP3 players, and tablet computers such as the iPad) represent new opportunities in terms of ubiquitous field recording and audio production potential as they are ready-to-hand while on the move. These new opportunities involve not only creative dimensions, they also allow for tactical explorations of the political, technological and cultural economies in which mobile media technologies are embedded and continuously (re)defined.
This workshop will focus on these new audio opportunities through a hands-on demonstration of different techniques and technologies, building on Chapman’s experience designing and developing the Audio-Mobile iPhone app over the course of the past year. Sam Thulin will also help lead the workshop, bringing his specific expertise with mobile media devices and sound recording practices.
The Audio-Mobile app uses the iPhone’s built-in mic for digital audio field recording, but allows date, time, location, GPS coordinates, an on-location photograph and a series of user-defined “notes” to be registered simultaneously. It has different file sharing options, including sending audio and data files by email attachment or uploading them to a website and interactive Google map. Those workshop participants with iPhones will be invited to download the beta version of the Audio-Mobile app. We will also have a number of iPhones on-hand for workshop participants to try out Audio-Mobile and a selection of other sound recording and remixing apps.
Schedule:
11:00 am: Worskhop-Discussion and demonstration of various mobile field recording options, especially for cell phones. Demonstration of the Audio-Mobile iPhone app.
1:00 pm: Lunch (please bring your own in order to keep the lunch break short)
1:45 pm: Field recording record sounds, using personal devices or equipment made available by the workshop organizers (please bring your iPhones and Zoom recorders)
2:30 pm: Extracting sounds from devices, listening, remixing, discussion
Cost: $10
reservation at lab@oboro.net or 514 844-3250 ext. 230
(the workshop will be bilingual)
Owen Chapman is an audio artist whose work involves sample-based music, video projection, contact microphones and old electronic instruments. He is director of the Montreal Mobile Media Lab, located in the Communication Studies department at Concordia University, where he is also an assistant professor in Sound Production and Scholarship.
Dr Charity Marsh is Canada Research Chair in Interactive Media and Performance in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Regina. She has published on electronic music, rave culture, Indigenous hip hop culture, arts-based community programming, fandom, and creative technologies. She is also the creator and director of the IMP Labs which house a beat-making and electronic music lab, an interactive DJ studio, an ethnomusicology and fieldwork lab, as well as an editing/production studio.
