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Movable Parts:

mobilizing sound/space-making technology to make a bustling Los Angeles

http://movableparts.org

@ movablepartpart

Wendy Hsu, Steve Kemper, and Linda Wei

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Who are we?

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What is Movable Parts?

Mission: �

to deploy the nakashi street performance paradigm to create a bustling public in Los Angeles

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Nakashi: a sound/space paradigm

Nakashi is an itinerant performance practice in Taiwan. Brought over from Japan during the Japanese Occupation Era in Taiwan, Nakashi in Japanese is “Nagashi” (流し), meaning “flow.” Flow refers to the flexible mode of performance. Nakashi musicians use sounding objects such as instruments and loudspeakers to create ad hoc, mobile stages. Traditionally, using acoustic guitar and accordion, Nakashi musicians traveled on foot to perform popular songs of their time in tea parlors and hot springs resorts. Over time, nakashi musicians innovate their practices by constructing stages on pickup trucks and farm tools in the streets and public areas such as the temple plaza. Equipping these mobile stages with loudspeakers, they turn toward the streets and public spaces as their stage and audience.

Here’s an example of a performance troupe that traveled on a truck bed while disseminating sounds of their performance in the streets. Notice the loudspeaker that’s mounted on top of the mobile mini shrine.

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Nakashi: a Sound/Space-Making Paradigm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMZ45QcSPzc

Most contemporary nakashi performances are ad hoc performances that take place in public spaces such as parks and metro stations. They are all unabashedly powered by diesel generators.

Here’s a video of a performance that took place in a park across the street from the largest temple in Taipei. Listen to the sound of the generator that provides the electricity required for the musical equipment. In addition to its utility, the generator becomes an invisible sonic constituent that underlies all of these performances.

What nakashi provides us is a unique performance paradigm that intersects sound and space making through the use of low-resource technology. The constituents of both sound and space are inseparable. They make up the utilitarian and aesthetic core of the nakashi culture. Sound plays a central role in creating space; but not just any space, but a bustling location, a place of social congregation and temporally defined micro-communities. Or simply put, sound constitutes the social experience of space; and vice versa.

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Why a Bustling LA?

Renao 熱鬧 = “Heat” + “Loud”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JORi5hvoCpA

Why bustling? And Why LA? LA has an unusual history as a metropolis without distinctive sites of urban density. A city built for highways and suburbs, its decentralized structure makes location-based vibrancy a scarcity. To counter this infrastructural decentralization, we make human-scale creative systems and design events of implementation to encourage and instigate social engagement.

As a sound ethnographer of Taiwan, I’m interested in recreating the Taiwanese notion of bustling -- renao. Re means “heat” (often used to describe an abundance of human presence) and nao means “loud.” Together, with an abundance of human presence and loudness, renao represents a specific kind of vibrancy that I think is lacking in LA. I’d like to think that what we’re doing is to create a platform as a means to ignite an abundance of human and sonic energy in a city that lacks these elements of social life, particularly in the public; or otherwise, articulate the less than legible social energy in an ostensibly asocial public.

[Video]: listen to the embeddedness of conversations, traffic sounds, and music blasting from homemade speaker cabinets. Pay attention to the dynamic sound/space-making paradigm in this scenario. This immersive sound environment is desirable. Definitively sonic in its form, It represents renao, a state of abundance of social energy.

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Movable Party 1.0

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workshop: mode of engagement

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Movable Party, the Event

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoNapFnK4TI

We designed and built a bicycle generator that through pedaling creates the electricity necessary to power a PA system. Each of pieces of the system could be transported -- the battery and the hub motors -- via bicycles. By bringing people together to pedal in order to generate electricity, we create a Movable Party, hence, the name of the event produced by the system.

This video is captured our last appearance at Ciclavia in October where we teamed up with a group called DanceLAvia. We set up our bicycle generator in front of Grand Park in downtown LA to encourage CicLAvia participants to slow down for a dismount point. There we spontaneously recruited young Movable Party participants and in my opinion, successfully created a bustling micro-community in downtown LA. --- Watch and Listen to how this recording embodies the Taiwanese notion of bustling -- renao.

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Tachometer: RPM to BPM

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Arduino Sensors

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Step Sequencer

http://vimeo.com/71125368