3: A Short Note About the Bus Tour

In Fall of 2000, e-Xplo began to work on a public art project that manifested itself as part bus tour, part electro-acoustic music performance and part public talks.  e-Xplo started to build on that original project/idea by creating tours for different sites.

e-Xplo uses the "public space" of the tour as the ground to engage with questions related to social identity and the urban landscape (by physically traversing the performance through chosen places).

e-Xplo's agenda is to examine manifestation(s) of global forces in specific social and cultural settings as opportunities for modes of urban experience and material configurations of (within) the urban environment. With each tour the group (shall) investigate(s) a distinct but related research topic, thus focusing on specific issues for concrete places and problems, while also searching for broader insights.  In turn each topic examines a crucial dynamic of contemporary public life. These include the public spectacle of information, the transformation of land into property, population and  mobility, identity, extreme environmental conditions and changes. Each tour independently explores the relationship between organizational methods and phenomena - from the electronic to the environmental - the spatial and material configurations of the built environment - from the infrastructural to the intimate. Moreover, each topic investigates how these relationships alter through space and how these dynamic scans become a source for a new criteria of performance and social reciprocity.
 
In doing so, e-Xplo treats the audio tour as an opportunity for both insight into and the articulation of these relationships. Although each tour tells a story of a place, the tour avoids ordinary narration. Instead the work relies on the topographical anatomy of the site outside the window and the soundscape within the bus to guide the "tourists".

The original tour, of Williamsburg Brooklyn, was called Dencity and it succeeded not only in bringing different interests (e.g., cities, in-between spaces, movement, sound, popular cultural forms, etc…), but also in creating a work that attracted a diverse public .This project as well as 65MPH, the subsequent "tour" (Spring, '01) of the highways and bridges connecting New York City, have given  the motivation and idea for a larger project that will take place over a more expansive period and will cover a larger territory (different cities).

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