250 Miles Crossing Philadelphia
A project by PolakVanBekkum
We visited the Mill Creek Farm at 49th and Brown. Aviva Asher, the director of the farm, took the time to show us around, and we met the farmer Micaiah Hall briefly. They were wrapping up the Saturday market and heading for a community event nearby to sell the vegetables that weren’t sold yet that morning.
Every month we organize a feedback group to exchange ideas about our artistic approach and the artistic work of others we are inspired by.
Today we decided to go for a bike ride to the John Heinz Wildlife Park, which is situated in South Philadelphia next to the airport. We did some sound recording tests of the nature, and we were amazed that we could still see the high rises of Center City at the swamp’s horizon…. We also did some amazing sound recordings of the cars passing, underneath this overpass… …and along the shores of the Delaware River. We enjoyed some unexpected nature findings, two turkey vultures on the landing strip.
Find below some impressions of our first “First Friday” event in Philadelphia. We were introduced to this event by Jichen Zhu and her friend Santiago Ontañón, seen in the first picture. After a nice dinner we went to the VOX building, with had a younger audience and more experimental work. When leaving, we found hard core art selling happening right in the street.
This morning Peter Crimmins and Emma Lee from WHYY followed us down 9th street through the Italian Market to hear and see what we’ll be up to in the coming 6 months.
Daniël Maarleveld, is an Amsterdam-based graphic designer and typographer. He also creates evolving letters and whole alphabets, like our project logo.
Today we gave the mic and the GPS to Michael, who walked a 30 minute route through Penn’s campus. For me (Ivar), who walked behind him to record ambient sound, it was almost a meditative experience to just follow the decisions he made 10 meters in front of me. This afternoon I’ll listen to the recordings he made and see how his story combines with his GPS tracks.
Part of our research is to investigate the city’s diverse spatial sounds. Today we encountered some remarkable ones in the Gallery on Market Street.
Drexel Co-op at the University City Science Center, STEAM Initiatives department
Majors: International Business and Marketing
Minors: Spanish and Dance
Software:
MilkMachine02
open source API and a custom build Python plugin for the open source GIS platform QGIS.
developed in collaboration with Sean McGinnis and Edward Farrel.