Three Parascopes are back in the streets of Malmö for the Malmö Festival and beyond.

Festival Parascoping

During the Malmö Festival there’s a lot of people out and about. It’s the perfect time to discuss what Malmö could be like with less cars. The Parascopes, and the various future panoramas they display, act as conversation catalysts to keep up a dialogue between the city-planners, politicians and Malmö citizens.

On-site and on-line

Check out possible Malmö-futures at Stadshuset, Folkets Park and Kungsgatan/Amiralsgatan (until August 21) or explore and discuss on-line at www.malmo.se/framtidskikarna. Hopefully the Parascopes will become permanent and recurring in Malmö, and will come to act as signs that a place is put into play, is in flux and open for debate.

More Parascope reading

Read more about the Parascopes and Unsworn Visuals’ collaboration with the City of Malmö in this article published in Danish landscape architecture magazine Landskap a few months ago.

Future futurising

This autumn we will continue working on formats, tools, and processes for envisioning and discussing potential futures. We’re gathering a dream-team visualisers, citizens, and city-planners.

What places do you think would need a Parascope?

Four Ophones are at your sonic service for a week at Spångatan in central Malmö.

Ophones in the streets of Malmö

During Malmöfestivalen, August 14-21, Unsworn Telecom offers festival-goers of all ages and preferences an unruly infrastructure for musical communication and co-creation.

After two days in the street, we’ve already heard teenagers regurgitating their childhood hardships, mad hatters improvising rampageous kletzmer masterpieces, neighbours threatening to cut-the-cables-if-the-racket-doesn’t-stop-immediately, subtle bicycle-bell interferences, and a friend lovingly turning his rent bill into a crumpled lump in the process of composing a paper-crackling poem.

Ophoniste Grand Prix 2009

Last Friday of the Festival, August 21 at 9pm, new ophone-virtuosos will battle it out with local rockstars, noisemakers and loopaholics at a sparkling, juried event hosted by Unsworn Telecom suits: Ophoniste Grand Prix 2009.

Ophones and Ophonestations?

Ophonestation Malmö is a group of public loop-machines: ophones. Each ophone is made up of a speaker with an attached telephone receiver. By depressing a button on the receiver, ophonists can record sounds which are repeated forever, until another sound is recorded into the same ophone.

The Ophonestation is a space for collaborative and playful sonic experiments that blurs the border of passers-by, composers, musicians and audience. Ophonists from Tokyo to Brösarp have for the last five years created everything from minimal mumbling-poetry to massive chants and rump-shaking beat infernos.

Bora Yoon in 2007 Pophorn action.

Our favourite New York omni-sonic audio architectress, Bora Yoon, just sent us this video of her 2007 ( (( PHONATION )) ) performance at Lincoln Center in New York City: A unique rendition of Kaki King’s ‘Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers’ with cell phones, voice, turntable, and Pophorns.

Let’s sit back and remember those pre-Iphone days while we’re waiting for Unsworn Mobile’s batch of new Pophorns…