BOOK 11, Part 3: The Underworld
Video
Alternate video of same video with music
Video
Source: vimeo.com/19569899
Soundwalk - Ulysses’ Syndrome
from Diego Funkyto
In the 12th century before Jesus Christ, Ulysses, hero of Greek mythology, struggled to return to the kingdom of Ithaca of which he was King, having fought in the war at Troy. Victim of the wrath of the god Poseidon, it took him ten years to return home: ten years marked by a series
of adventures and recounted in the Odyssey of Homer, one of the fundamental texts of Western culture. Charmed by sirens, then preyed upon by the Cyclops, imprisoned by the
nymph Calypso, then carried to Hell or transformed into a pig by Circe, Ulysses roamed from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other…
In 2009, the Soundwalk collective set out to retrace the steps of Ulysses’ voyage. On board a ship specially equipped with long-range antennas and scanners, Soundwalk recorded all the hertzian frequencies along the shores of the Mediterranean, and thus collected hundreds of thousands of hours: from the conversations of Libyan fishermen on Greek cargo ships, passing yachts on the Corsican coast and customs officers of the Bay of Naples.
All the humanity of the Mediterranean is represented in these sonic fragments, like a tower of Babel.
This voyage of “sound fishing” is a map of anthropological thoroughfares of peoples who occupy the Mediterranean coasts 3000 years after the passage of Ulysses.
The result is a sonic fresco of 24 hours (resonant of the 24 songs of Homer’s Odyssey), composed of fragments of sound from the Mediterranean, like a sponge that had been
plunged into the sea and that emerged saturated with hertzian frequencies that travel on the surface of the Mediterranean. Stephan Crasneanscki’s photographs are a visual accompaniment to this sound collage. Captured twelve miles offshore, they show the coastal Mediterranean that Ulysses knew, three thousand years later: unchanged...
from Diego Funkyto
In the 12th century before Jesus Christ, Ulysses, hero of Greek mythology, struggled to return to the kingdom of Ithaca of which he was King, having fought in the war at Troy. Victim of the wrath of the god Poseidon, it took him ten years to return home: ten years marked by a series
of adventures and recounted in the Odyssey of Homer, one of the fundamental texts of Western culture. Charmed by sirens, then preyed upon by the Cyclops, imprisoned by the
nymph Calypso, then carried to Hell or transformed into a pig by Circe, Ulysses roamed from one shore of the Mediterranean to the other…
In 2009, the Soundwalk collective set out to retrace the steps of Ulysses’ voyage. On board a ship specially equipped with long-range antennas and scanners, Soundwalk recorded all the hertzian frequencies along the shores of the Mediterranean, and thus collected hundreds of thousands of hours: from the conversations of Libyan fishermen on Greek cargo ships, passing yachts on the Corsican coast and customs officers of the Bay of Naples.
All the humanity of the Mediterranean is represented in these sonic fragments, like a tower of Babel.
This voyage of “sound fishing” is a map of anthropological thoroughfares of peoples who occupy the Mediterranean coasts 3000 years after the passage of Ulysses.
The result is a sonic fresco of 24 hours (resonant of the 24 songs of Homer’s Odyssey), composed of fragments of sound from the Mediterranean, like a sponge that had been
plunged into the sea and that emerged saturated with hertzian frequencies that travel on the surface of the Mediterranean. Stephan Crasneanscki’s photographs are a visual accompaniment to this sound collage. Captured twelve miles offshore, they show the coastal Mediterranean that Ulysses knew, three thousand years later: unchanged...