Park benches are an everyday feature in most parts of the world. Typically, they offer respite for tired legs, a momentary break from the office or a moment’s rest while the children burn-off excess energy.
Park Bench Sojourn is a multimodal arts project built around the activity of taking some time-out or a sojourn on a bench. Typically, the bench is of your finding, and the sojourn includes the process of walking to and from the bench. The website www.parkbenchsojourn.org, home to this digital media project, states that “Park bench sojourns are experiential and require participants to find a bench to sit on for the purposes of the sojourn. […] You are invited to participate in the project through the selection of sojourns available, any number and type, as appropriate, per outing.”
The project explores ideas of performativity and technology through the ways in which we ‘perform’ ourselves and mediate experience through digital technologies. It explores what it means to be human; surrounded, as we are, by computer technologies and digital media, living lives which are perpetually ‘connected’ and dispersed through the cloud. In particular, it reflects on how our technologically determined lives and lifestyles conspire against us to find opportunities to stop, reflect and be witnesses to lived experience.
The sojourns themselves vary in nature, with each one emphasising a particular sense and kind of experience. For example, ‘audio sojourns’ comprise listening to audio recordings made from other benches while ‘sight sojourns’ require you to watch video recordings which silently replay views from other benches. Choosing a ‘voice sojourn’ allows you to listen to a disembodied narrator describing what they see, hear and experience from yet another bench. The various kinds of content are all available on your mobile phone through downloading or streaming.
Other iterations of the project, distinct in that a bench is provided for you, have included a multimedia gallery installation juxtaposing content from a variety of sojourns and a therapeutic VR version. Regardless of the format, context or specific content, all sojourns serve the same end — to provide a bench-based aesthetically reflexive moment-in-time. At its simplest, the project is about awareness. In detail, each of the sojourns augments experience in a way that combines and contrasts the present and embodied, with the absent and virtual.
The initial idea behind Park Bench Sojourn was as a response to some frustrations with phonographic arts practice (c.2011). Looking for ways to present audio recordings that included a contextual and conceptual element, the idea to curate audio recordings made from park benches arose. Subsequently, as a response to a phase of explicitly participative ecological-arts practice (2012 - 2015), the basis for Park Bench Sojourn emerged more fully. In part, as a response to the cautiousness towards field recording apparent this participative ecological-arts practice (due to historic associations with objectification through documentation, on the one hand, and the fetishisation of the captured sound-object, on the other).
Whilst acknowledging these concerns and extending ideas of participation, the focus of Park Bench Sojourn is with less directly interventionist ways of participation towards activities such as walking, stillness, watching, listening, feeling, and reflecting. Park Bench Sojourn moves away from overt participation as the means to recover and affirm our connection with the environment, towards a more nuanced mode of contemplative witnessing that stresses more essentialists qualities of unitive experience, our dwelling as part of, and participants with, nature and the lifeworld as it unfolds around us.
Related to this are aesthetic experiences where objectively perceived states of consciousness fluctuate and give way to a ‘loss of self’. Such experiences are well documented across a number of areas, in particular those related to creativity, arts and musical practices. In Park Bench Sojourn the scope widens to include 13th century Islamic scholar and mystic Ibn’Arabi, on the one hand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, on a very other hand.
Complementing the idea that sojourns are both one thing and another (present and embodied, absent and virtual), Ibn’Arabi’s esoteric thought on the metaphysics of unity explains that the mystics view of True Reality (that is, for sake of argument, God), from which all things emanate, from two different angles: (1) as the Essence of all phenomena, and (2) as the manifested phenomena of that Essence. The idea that two subjective aspects of one reality can co-exist mirrors the transcendent quality of heightened aesthetic experiences as well as, arguably, moments when we retreat into more contemplation states that park benches, and park bench sojourns, both represent and facilitate.
The contrasting influence of Sartre comes from his philosophical novel, Nausea, in which the main character Antoine Roquentin undergoes a series of metaphysical experiences that estrange him from the world, the most climactic of which occurs on a park bench. In the novel Roquentin’s character describes nauseating and mind shattering experiences, which gradually build to the realisation that existence is nothing, rather than something; words and the method of using them disappear, along with the meaning of things. Through this confrontation with pure being, a meaningless flow of brute existence and alienation, he comes to doubt even his own existence. The writing brilliantly encapsulates a powerful encounter with the contingency of being and its disorienting impact on subjectivity and ‘loss of self.’ Although the context for understanding these experiences and conclusions about them couldn’t be more different, the parallel helps articulate the conceptual and aesthetical vision of Park Bench Sojourn.
Park Bench Sojourn is a multimodal arts project built around the activity of taking some time-out or a sojourn on a bench. Typically, the bench is of your finding, and the sojourn includes the process of walking to and from the bench. The website www.parkbenchsojourn.org, home to this digital media project, states that “Park bench sojourns are experiential and require participants to find a bench to sit on for the purposes of the sojourn. […] You are invited to participate in the project through the selection of sojourns available, any number and type, as appropriate, per outing.”
The project explores ideas of performativity and technology through the ways in which we ‘perform’ ourselves and mediate experience through digital technologies. It explores what it means to be human; surrounded, as we are, by computer technologies and digital media, living lives which are perpetually ‘connected’ and dispersed through the cloud. In particular, it reflects on how our technologically determined lives and lifestyles conspire against us to find opportunities to stop, reflect and be witnesses to lived experience.
The sojourns themselves vary in nature, with each one emphasising a particular sense and kind of experience. For example, ‘audio sojourns’ comprise listening to audio recordings made from other benches while ‘sight sojourns’ require you to watch video recordings which silently replay views from other benches. Choosing a ‘voice sojourn’ allows you to listen to a disembodied narrator describing what they see, hear and experience from yet another bench. The various kinds of content are all available on your mobile phone through downloading or streaming.
Other iterations of the project, distinct in that a bench is provided for you, have included a multimedia gallery installation juxtaposing content from a variety of sojourns and a therapeutic VR version. Regardless of the format, context or specific content, all sojourns serve the same end — to provide a bench-based aesthetically reflexive moment-in-time. At its simplest, the project is about awareness. In detail, each of the sojourns augments experience in a way that combines and contrasts the present and embodied, with the absent and virtual.
The initial idea behind Park Bench Sojourn was as a response to some frustrations with phonographic arts practice (c.2011). Looking for ways to present audio recordings that included a contextual and conceptual element, the idea to curate audio recordings made from park benches arose. Subsequently, as a response to a phase of explicitly participative ecological-arts practice (2012 - 2015), the basis for Park Bench Sojourn emerged more fully. In part, as a response to the cautiousness towards field recording apparent this participative ecological-arts practice (due to historic associations with objectification through documentation, on the one hand, and the fetishisation of the captured sound-object, on the other).
Whilst acknowledging these concerns and extending ideas of participation, the focus of Park Bench Sojourn is with less directly interventionist ways of participation towards activities such as walking, stillness, watching, listening, feeling, and reflecting. Park Bench Sojourn moves away from overt participation as the means to recover and affirm our connection with the environment, towards a more nuanced mode of contemplative witnessing that stresses more essentialists qualities of unitive experience, our dwelling as part of, and participants with, nature and the lifeworld as it unfolds around us.
Related to this are aesthetic experiences where objectively perceived states of consciousness fluctuate and give way to a ‘loss of self’. Such experiences are well documented across a number of areas, in particular those related to creativity, arts and musical practices. In Park Bench Sojourn the scope widens to include 13th century Islamic scholar and mystic Ibn’Arabi, on the one hand, and Jean-Paul Sartre, on a very other hand.
Complementing the idea that sojourns are both one thing and another (present and embodied, absent and virtual), Ibn’Arabi’s esoteric thought on the metaphysics of unity explains that the mystics view of True Reality (that is, for sake of argument, God), from which all things emanate, from two different angles: (1) as the Essence of all phenomena, and (2) as the manifested phenomena of that Essence. The idea that two subjective aspects of one reality can co-exist mirrors the transcendent quality of heightened aesthetic experiences as well as, arguably, moments when we retreat into more contemplation states that park benches, and park bench sojourns, both represent and facilitate.
The contrasting influence of Sartre comes from his philosophical novel, Nausea, in which the main character Antoine Roquentin undergoes a series of metaphysical experiences that estrange him from the world, the most climactic of which occurs on a park bench. In the novel Roquentin’s character describes nauseating and mind shattering experiences, which gradually build to the realisation that existence is nothing, rather than something; words and the method of using them disappear, along with the meaning of things. Through this confrontation with pure being, a meaningless flow of brute existence and alienation, he comes to doubt even his own existence. The writing brilliantly encapsulates a powerful encounter with the contingency of being and its disorienting impact on subjectivity and ‘loss of self.’ Although the context for understanding these experiences and conclusions about them couldn’t be more different, the parallel helps articulate the conceptual and aesthetical vision of Park Bench Sojourn.