Invisible City Audio Tour: A Surreal Oakland Adventure

Want to go on a surreal geography tour of Oakland?

Check out Invisible City Audio Tours and its self-guided audio walking tour, Heliography, this Friday, Oct. 1, from 5 p.m. until dark.

Each tour is available as a free download along with a map and features emerging authors, curators, composers, musicians, performers, designers, cartographers, and artists local to the neighborhood explored.

What more do you want? Trapeze artists? I'll put in a vote for a ventriloquist and leave it at that.

Along with the audio component, the tour exhibits temporary, semi-temporary, and permanent visual art installations (I prefer semi-temporary installations to semi-permanent ones, although semi-absent ones are always the best, being so semi-ripe with semi-possibilities, but that's just me).

The event’s inspiration comes from Italo Calvino, who wrote in his book Invisible Cities, “And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.”

Here’s the skinny on how to hear the invisible reasons that Oakland lives and bring it to life again (if Jerry Brown had only known):

• Download the audio tour along with the map onto an MP3 player or onto a CD for walkman.
• Refrain from listening to the tour until the happening.
• Come to the MacArthur BART station, and push play (preferably right as you dismount the train in the platform).
• Walk the tour, stop at the landmarks and buy souvenirs from the visual artists (bring $$ or be square).
• Stop at the Murmur and say hello (or be square)
• Come grab a pint at the Commonwealth Cafe and Pub (or be square)

Invisible City Audio Tours was founded in 2010 by the whirling creative dervish Tavia Stewart-Streit (Watchword Press, National Novel Writing Month, and certainly much more).