We will gather outdoors on Sunday evening to reflect, celebrate the audio stories shared on the map, enjoy snacks, and give out cash awards for the Most Historical, Most Creative, Most Chaotic and Most Touching submissions, as decided by an esteemed jury.
The project itself will go live on the Echoes mobile application bright and early Saturday morning (June 3rd), so ideally you can visit the featured locations and hear their stories before this Sunday evening celebration.
RSVP for free on Eventbrite to be notified when the location is selected in late May! An outdoor location in NYC will be strategically selected depending on submission locations. This will likely be a public park or community garden.
Any donations will go toward a premium Echoes membership required to keep this project public all summer long!
It’s not too late to submit your own story! Anyone with memories in New York City from their youth can participate, no audio production experience necessary. Deadline May 24!
Check out the details here.
THE PROJECT
Echoes of Youth is a participatory art project created by artist Megan Hattie Stahl exploring youth experiences in the publicly accessible spaces of New York City. Audio submissions are combined to create an interactive, walkable map of sounds and memories spanning generations and boroughs.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Participants submit short audio stories (1-5 minutes long) meant to be heard at a specific public location in New York City. This can be an intersection, a park, a coffee shop, a subway station, a church, a school, a beach, a university, a grocery store, a bus stop… and more! Stories can be as simple as a voice memo or as complex as a multitrack production. When someone visits your story’s corresponding location, you audio will play automatically through the Echoes geolocated sound app!
WHO CAN PARTICIPATE?
Anyone who is roughly between the ages of 15 and 24 (the United Nation’s definition of youth) or anyone who can create an audio story about a New York City memory or place from their youth. Folks in either category are encouraged to participate either separately or together; multigenerational entries can bring valuable historical complexity to the project! No audio production experience necessary.
BIOS
Megan Hattie Stahl (project director)
Megan Hattie Stahl (she/her) is a documentary artist and educator based between Portland, Oregon and New York City. Megan is an MFA Candidate in Integrated Media Arts at Hunter College and a 2022-23 Social Practice CUNY Actionist Fellow. She also teaches in Hunter’s Film & Media department. Her work uses video, audio, and new media to explore culture and communities past and present, physical and virtual. She is interested in musical histories and realities, and relationships between sound, place, memory, and collectivity. Megan loves digging into history and activating the archives, creating unique audience experiences that are both individual and collective in nature.
Chloë Bass (jury)
Chloë Bass is an artist who loves listening to sounds. She also serves as the co-director of Social Practice CUNY, an educational network that amplifies the collective power of socially engaged artists, scholars, and advocates throughout the City University of New York’s rich tapestry of faculty, staff, and students working for social justice.
Coline Chevrin (jury)
Coline Chevrin (The Graduate Center) is fourth-year Ph.D. student in Geography at the department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. After a Master’s Degree in Territorial Policies for Sustainable Development, Coline specialized in territorial and development studies. She was an assistant professor and researcher in Argentina at the Universidad Nacional de Rosario from 2013 to 2017. Her research focuses on the impact of the soybean extractivist model on the restructuring of the city of Rosario, Argentina. She analyses how the extractive frontier is materialized in the different spaces of the city, how communities organize to resist enclosure and displacement and to secure space to create beautiful lives. She is particularly interested in Latin American situated knowledge, decolonial praxis, Global South and feminist geographies. Coline has been experimenting visualizing her research through documentary photography and alternative methods and has incorporated working with artists as part of her praxis. She is an adjunct at the Geography Department at Hunter College.
Meryl Jones (jury)
Meryl Jones (they/them) is a filmmaker, sound artist, and actor. They came to filmmaking for its capacity to intermingle and complicate multiple self-expressions. Their work blurs the boundaries between narrative, experimental, documentary, and home video. And they especially love the process of sound and how it can be in dissonance to the image! They have directed three short films; Goldilocks, The Love Spell, and Dom screened at various festivals including Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, Newfest, and online for The New Yorker Magazine and No Budge. They are a co-founder of Sweet Potato Productions and sometimes educator at Brooklyn-based analogue film-collective Mono No Aware.”
