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4:00 PM-6:00 PM

Path of Awareness – Sounding Chinatown

Performative Sound Walk|with katrinem & semantic matter lab

  • Meeting place for walk, Boston, MA

  • Admission free, please RSVP
Book your free ticket

Path of Awareness ©Katrinem

Path of Awareness ©Katrinem

Path of Awareness is an artistic walking format that explores how space is experienced through conscious movement and listening. Developed for Chinatown in Boston, this edition responds to the neighborhood’s layered architecture and the presence of Interstate 90, whose continuous infrastructural sound shapes the area’s atmosphere. Through a steady, moderate pace and deliberately open listening, participants expand their auditory field beyond the habitual filtering of everyday life. The walk invites attention to subtle acoustic shifts: reverberations between buildings, the masking and revealing of voices, the rhythm of traffic, and the sound of one’s own footsteps meeting pavement and concrete. Shoes become instruments; walking becomes a dialogue with architecture. The site-specific route turns the path itself into the destination. Thresholds—between quiet and noise, enclosure and exposure—emerge as lived spatial moments. Listening while walking reveals that infrastructure is not only seen but also heard, felt, and embodied. Since 2012, more than 25 Path of Awareness works have been realized worldwide, including in Berlin, Linz, New York, Tehran, Mexico City, and Marseille. Sounding Chinatown continues this evolving practice at a critical moment of urban transformation.

Check out the rest of the Walking Festival of Sound events on their website Walking Festival of Sound 2026

We encourage you to book tickets in advance of the events. This way we can stay in touch in case of udpates or changes to the program. All events are free, although spots are limited.

Presented in cooperation with Walking Festival of Sound, semantic matter lab, Harvard ArtLab and Loeb Fellowship.
 

Artists

  • katrinem

    katrinem's artistic practice explores the relationships between sound, space, and movement, with walking and listening as fundamental acts. For over twenty years, she has investigated the walkability, acoustics, and atmospheres of urban and architectural environments through performative and installation-based works such as go your gait! and Path of Awareness. These projects reveal the rhythmic interplay of footsteps, spatial structures, and ambient sound. Everyday life serves as the starting point for creative transformation in her work. Ordinary objects—such as brooms or shoes—are reimagined as instruments that intertwine movement and sound in projects like Andante, BesenBallett, and Raumspiel, often involving participatory elements and collective action in public space. Her projects emerge from intensive site-specific research and interdisciplinary collaboration with artists, scientists, architects, and urban planners, inviting audiences to reconsider their habitual experience of space and discover the often-overlooked musicality of everyday movement and listening.
     

    katrinem

  • Dietmar Offenthuber

    Dietmar Offenhuber is Professor of Design and Public Policy at Northeastern University, Boston, where he is currently chair of the Department of Art+Design and leads the semantic matter lab. Dietmar’s current research examines material visualization practices and the production of evidence, synthetic data, and non-representational aspects of data. He is the author of the award-winning monograph “Waste is Information” (MIT Press) and has published books on urban data and accountability technologies. His new book “Autographic Design – the Matter of Data in a Self-inscribing World” (MIT Press) examines material visualization practices and the production of evidence.

    Dietmar Offenhuber

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