A journey is something that takes you from A to B while challenging your comfort zone in the process, therefore quite probably changing you.
Sonic Journey in an immersive, cross-disciplinary audio guided experience which describes the concept of travel and how it universally affects the man; how it impacts its identity, its story, the new thoughts it triggers inside. Both the positive and the unsettling elements of travelling.
It´s conceived to make the audience go on a virtual journey by experiencing what any traveller goes through: the excitement, the confusion, the drama, the challenge overcoming, the peace, the knowledge gained.
It also covers nowadays migration, the more individual and spiritual aspects of any journey, and all the questions these human movements awake inside.
The linking element for the story telling is the great migration from Africa of the first human beings, the Bushmen (San People), which started 60,000 years ago and resulted in the population of the whole globe while originating the different human races.
Theirs is the greatest journey ever, as it´s what actually gave place to our own; but more importantly, it also means that if we go back in time enough your grandfather, my grandfather and everyone´s in the planet are the same.
In order to explore a bit more of our own journey and celebrate our common origin, a series of folk tales from the Bushmen and other key texts are read by volunteers from all over the world and edited to form a storytelling with their experience. Also, using the contents (video, pictures) of the smartphones of the audience, we embed their own experience into the visual narrative of a virtual journey where the main character is the viewer.
After exploring its senses of adventure, excitement, the real drama and the spiritual journey present in every travel, this work reaches the present day, when it is up to us to decide how the journey will unfold, as we take it on us to continue what the San People started more than 60,000 years ago.
We reached here, today- and now, what?
We leave this question open and offer as possible closure for this opportunity a bit of quirkiness hoping that humour and tenderness may make the journey still ahead of us a bit more interesting….
The thesis there is that the first Bushman that left Africa was no different from any of us, here and now, as journeys democratically bring us to our default settings, before any constraints set us apart.
This is a proposal for walking not a mile but 60,000 years in the shoes of the Bushmen to recreate not their journey but to re-live our own. To switch places with what we were, maybe what we will be.
It’s not they walking, it’s me, it´s us. After all, we’re all San People.
SONIC JOURNEY
All the voice overs in this project come from volunteers who for the most part recorded themselves remotely from their own homes using their personal devices and submitted their audios, adding their personal voice to this journey. None of them were recorded at the same time or were reading the texts together.
Follow the texts here
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THE JOURNEY
Music and concept – Yaiza Varona
A big thank you to all those who made this possible
The Journey Companions so far:
Tons of help and inspiration:
[ezcol_1third]Music and Concept
Yaiza Varona
The journey of The Journey so far:
Sonic Journey has different versions that range from a solely audio experience to the full cross disciplinary immersive experience adapted to the space of the performance.
A first draft of this project, in its audio version, was premiered in experimental audio festival Audioblast 3 in Nantes, France in February 2015 and streamed globally in real time.
A second version including visual content from more than a dozen artists who provided their own vision of different stages of the journey and live visuals was performed in the premiere of tech festival Techtoberfest 2015 in London Fields, London.
Sonic Journey in Audioblast 3 (Friday 27th, 22:00h France time)
Sonic Journey in Techtoberfest 2015, 2nd October 19:00 London Time
Sonic Journey in Homeland for Nour Festival 2016, 5th November 16:00h London Time
Currently in R&D, it is our intention to keep exploring the different aspects of it and make it grow towards its full potential.
Get in touch here: sonicjourney @ yaizavarona dot com
Sources: