Scene at Jaffa St.: Anti Tech Propaganda

Jerusalem Central Bus Station: Nine Sound Portraits. Recorded at 10.03.2015, about 21:00. Scene 1 of 9. I chose the Jerusalem Central Bus Station as a locus for documentation because it is a familiar point, a portal through which I come and go almost on daily basis, sometimes several times a day: I live in Tel Aviv but study and work in Jerusalem. As I don’t own a private car, public transportation is the only locomotive option available to me – and I always try to approach public transportation not merely as a functional necessity: I wish to approach it as a journey, to be able to find in it opportunity and chance, encounter and magic. The work documents nine different points in and around the Central Bus Station through sound and image. The materials were gathered over the course of two days, during two consecutive journeys I made. Therefore, I was not (or at least, not only) an outsider documenting a certain space, but an active user of that space – walking within it and interacting with it all the time. Each one of the nine portraits present acoustic excess, usually regarded simply as noise (engines, horns, phones, shouts, etc.). This excess produces an almost unavoidable experience of “dirty listening”, from which it is not easy to escape – one can see a lot of people in buses and stations with headsets, listening to music or talking on the phone. Each portrait had been assigned a number that carries both a descriptive and symbolic meaning: The numbers hail from my own personal biography of public transportation, indicating bus lines that I use in my daily life in Jerusalem, as well as other bus lines that have been crystallized as memories from my childhood and army service days. Each number also indicates the length (in seconds) of its assigned portrait, and so encodes information in two different realms. The images attached to the sounds are produced by a juxtaposition of photos taken at the points in which the original sound was recorded (sometimes more than one photo) and the spectro