Eija Loponen-Stephenson

Urban Choreographics 

Solo Exhibition 
2024
Produit Rien 
Montreal QC

*Exhibition text by Ally Rosilio at the bottom of the page 

What is the meter/tempo of your normal walk?
How often do you blink?
What is the current tempo of your breathing?
What is the current tempo of your heart rate?
What other rhythms do you hear if you listen?
What is your relationship to all the rhythms you can perceive at once?

Pauline Oliveros, Rhythms (1996),(2004).

How to Determine the Meter of Collective Movement: A walking practice

In response to Oliveros’s score, this synchronization exercise is a walking practice through which one can literally take the pulse of a crowd. While this practice could be used in any circumstance of collective movement, it is ideally activated while transferring train platforms.

The tools required for this practice are:

1. A smartphone,
   
2. A free metronome application,
   *Any metronome application adjustable meter dial will work.
   
3. Headphones compatible with your smartphone,
   
4. A notebook and writing implement or notes application.

The procedure is as follows:

i. Make note of the date, time and location and any other pertinent environmental factors such as weather, train delays, or large public events nearby which may be influencing the volume of foot traffic. If transferring stations note the lines, you are connecting.

*During my field research I would wait at a platform for a train to arrive and entered the crowd as they disembarked, making my way to another platform, performing as if I had somewhere to be.

ii. While standing in place or waiting in the train prior to your arrival, put on your headphones and open the metronome application. If possible, check your pulse and set the metronome to your current bpm. If it is not possible to get an accurate pulse reading, begin at 60bpm, an average resting heart rate for humans. 
iii. Enter the crowd walking one step per-beat. There will most likely be a dissonance between your pace and that of the crowd.

iv. Continue walking one step per-beat as you adjust the metronome dial until your pace feels to be in synchronization with the crowd.

v. Continue this pace until you reach your terminus. Record the traveling BPM.

vi. (Optional), If possible, check your pulse again to see how the exertion of keeping in phase with the crowd has affected your BPM.

vii. (Optional) When you arrive at your terminus, stand still and continue listening to the traveling BPM, notice any synchronicities or dissonances with other rhythms in the space which you can sense or observe.

-Eija Loponen-Stephenson (2024)

“Travelling between the intervals of the street’s in the city’s gridded plan, I learned to move at a measured pace in synchronization with crowds of strangers—just as the metronome trains the musician’s body to absorb tempo in muscle memory.”

—— Eija Loponen-Stephenson, Urban Choreographics: Tracing the Extralinguistic Pedagogies of the Montreal Underground (p. 2)

In landscape architect Lawrence Halprin’s “Cities” from 1963, movements of city-dwellers are scored across the maplike musical notations. Defying the gridded structure of the staff, as bodies often defy the angular confines of the metropolis, Halprin’s approach to designing public spaces through movement scores positions the built environment as a container to facilitate the fluid circulation of bodily movement. In “Urban Choreographics”, Eija Loponen-Stephenson’s research considers the relationships between spatial rhythms and the vocabulary of everyday movements collectively performed by commuters. Interested in the inherent dissonance experienced between the fluidity of bodily movement and the metric structuring of the cityscape, she asks:what forms of movement do public architectures anticipate from us? How do our bodies negotiate and deviate from the prescribed pathways of urban landscapes?

This collection of photographic, sculptural, textual, and sonic works is the result of a two-month self-directed residency performed by Loponen-Stephenson in the Montreal underground. In transfer stations, amid peak movement periods, she traced the paths, volume, texture, pace, and patterns of transiting bodies.Immersed in the underbelly of the city structure, she moved at a measured pace in synchronization with the crowd, her metronomic pulse tuned to the current of foot traffic. Loponen-Stephenson employs her body as a sensing tool, an approach which allows her both to perceive and actively participate in the programmed uniformity of spatial rhythm. Attached to her body through a harness, her Wearable Surface Recording and Monitoring (WSRM) mechanism sprawls down the vertebrae like some bionic membrane, extending the nervous system. Wires unfurl along the broomstick like tendrils, through which the spatiotemporal textures of urban space make themselves known to the body.

The sounds of the surfaces traced by the WSRM System stylus are lathe-cut onto archival plastic, grooves mapped out onto their surface as an aural landscape. At the listening station, the needle retraces the original paths of movement performed by Loponen-Stephenson in each transfer station, preserving the memory of the body’s trajectory through urban space. Ambient rhythms emerge from the needle tracking over the contours of stickers, signage, floor tiling and pathway marks. Biological materials—micro-fragments of skin, hair, and textiles—accumulated on the platform floor as dust, are also detected by the stylus and embedded in the surface of the plastic record, the unseen byproduct of human occupancy. These unexpected, dissonant textures make up the discontinuous sum of spatial rhythm.

Anchored to the floor with concrete, thegridded pathways installed in the centre of the gallery import the architecture of the subway system into the exhibition space. Black-and-white photographs documenting the frenetic motion of commuting bodies at each transfer station are wheat-pasted to the ceramic tiles embedded into the mesh of these structures. Excerpts from Loponen-Stephenson’s site-writings are graffitied on the back side of these tiles, inviting viewers to engage with the poetics of her sense-based research. Employing the technique of long-exposure film photography, the images included in this exhibition preserve the temporal qualities of place by capturing movement in such a way that it takes on an almost tangible form. Fleshy bodies, like beams of light, morph into streams of continuous and forward motion. These images of movement, haunting in their resemblance to the force of transit infrastructure, serve as a reminder of the unrelenting pace of capitalism and the speed-time of the production economy to which our bodies are indelibly inscribed. The users of public spaces whose trajectories deviate from the prescribed pathways of worker-commuters gather on the periphery of perpetual motion. Visible within the uniform pace of capitalist temporality, these subjects adopt a dissonance in their stillness.

This embodied approach to studying public space goes beyond viewing the body as a mere tool for optimization; instead, it considers the body as a complex organism constantly engaged in the process of reading and emerging within its surroundings. Unfolding asynchronously, Stephenson’s exhibition delves into the temporal, durational, and sensual dimensions of the cityscape. Together, these devices actively work to kinetically stimulate a remembrance of how connected built environments are with our own corporeality—that, they too, are bodies.

Text by Ally Rosilio