Meat Packing District Sound Walk_Eric Luo
To be frank, this is not my first time walking in the meat packing district. Or, to speak it more specifically, walking alone but with my i-Pod there. The “meat packing district” is the old-fashioned name of “Chelsea”, now the fancy well-known gathering destination of gay, fashion and hot chic, in New York City. Therefore, walking alone in the meat packing district is not unfamiliar for me. However, it’s really my first time walking in the meat packing district with an audio tour guide. It did defamiliarize me; make me feel strange to my favorite and most familiar area in New York City.
The narrator, Ivy, is an artist who owns a gallery in meat packing district. This is such an authentic and typical icon of folks who live here. In addition to SOHO, meat packing district is another highly gathering district of artists, fashion icons, boutiques and galleries in NYC. Along with Ivy’s audio guides, I realized that I have been to the Spice Market, SOHO house, Alexander Mcqueen (one of my favorite fashion designers) before. But, I never think about why they are here and notice the details of them. However, honestly speaking, what bother me in my mind are not the things I never discovered before, but the feeling of defamiliarization.
In my previous experience of walking in the meat packing district, it’s a two-fold situation of looking and to-be-looked-at-ness at the same time. As I mentioned before, meat packing district is no longer a district of packing meat only, but also a district of teeming with fashion, chic, and gay men. Being an Asian gay man and walking alone here, the felling is so complicated. On one hand, in terms of sexuality, here is a district which I assume that I belong here. But, on the other hand, in terms of ethnicity, this is not the place I belong to. Besides, I never think that I need a tour guide to lead me walking in the meat packing district. Moreover, leading by a tour guide which I assume she might be a lesbian (Actually speaking, I don’t know anything about her sexual orientation. It’s just my assumption and intuition) in the gay district is more complex.
Therefore, during the whole process of sound walk, I was thinking about the question of tourist gaze, another form of psychogeography. From the landscape to the mindscape, I not only watch the scenes around me. It also reflects me as the subject wandering in the district. Such as Lacan’s account of gaze, “Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see”. So, I am wondering to think about that is there any possibility of linking the discussion of sound walk and psychogeography. Does the audio tour guide play as the “punctum” in travelers’ consciousness? How about the aware travelers’ responses of listening to sound walks of the districts which they are familiar with?