Walkie-Talkies, Wandering, and Sonic Intimacy2019 Rowan Wilken

Mediated wandering, as Karen O’Rourke demonstrates at length in her book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers, has been of enduring interest within experimental artistic explorations of urbanism. One key, if little discussed, media technology that has been used within these experiments is the walkie-talkie. In this article, I examine two cases: US artist Sabrina Raaf’s Saturday (2002); and, Walk That Sound (2014), a Berlin-based project by Serbian sound designer Lukatoyboy (Luka Ivanović). Drawing on Dominic Pettman’s notion of “sonic intimacy,” I trace the different ways that these three sets of projects incorporate walkie-talkies in order to develop mediated forms of wandering that seek to capture place-based sonic ambiances and sonic intimacies.