Exploring the City Soundscape

A new species is populating our cities. These small electronic life forms, called Buqs, can shift the experience of the streetscape from the primarily visual to a more auditory experience.

The aim of this project, by artists Joris Hoogeboom and Teun Verkerk, is to enable the city-dweller to playfully interact with the sounds that occur in the local environment by creative displacing of emitters to turn the city into an instrument.

The life forms invade surfaces within the built environment and use them for the creation of sounds, exploring the city as an instrument through its material properties.

The distributed ecology of Buqs convert the public space into a soundscape that invites for active exploration and experimentation.

Diverting the invasion of the virtual realm into our public spaces by emphasizing the physical, the materiality of the city can be experienced in a completely new way.

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