This past Memorial Day I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park. Unusual because I don’t often get to Golden Gate Park, more so because this particular walk was guided by a pre-recorded narrator and soundtrack: a quirky audio tour entitled If you consider…created by musician and sound artist Jeremy Dalmas. I had agreed to meet Dalmas at the corner of Stanyan and Fulton (the tour’s departure point) to borrow his Discman and set of headphones and was surprised to learn he lived directly across the street. “How convenient,” I thought, and imagined people all over the city creating audio tours that began immediately outside their front doors. Who better to deliver the lay of the land?

The corner of Stanyan and Fulton where If you consider… begins.

I had been curious to take Dalmas’ tour ever since he emailed me about the project. Part of the appeal of If you consider… is its unauthorized—almost surreptitious existence. It’s far more common to encounter audio tours as institutionally sanctioned narratives designed to tutor museumgoers on the significance of an exhibition or an object. But practically since its inception the audio tour form has been appropriated, with varying degrees of success, as art. Early on the work of local group Antenna Theater (from which Antenna Audio, a leading producer of museum audio tours, grew), and more recently Janet Cardiff, has exploded ideas of what an audio tour can be. Too, the advent of compact, inexpensive recording equipment and desktop editing software paired with an ease of distribution via the web have allowed a dramatic increase in the number and diversity of audio tours available as podcasts. From homegrown “hacking” like Art Mobs’ unofficial audio guides for MoMA to commercial enterprises like Soundwalk, the audio tour is becoming an increasingly popular mode for both presenting and experiencing the world around us. Composed, performed and recorded by Dalmas with little outside assistance, and now distributed as an MP3 from Lulu.com, If you consider… falls at the homegrown, artsy end of the spectrum. More novel to me however is the outdoor setting—the park as both subject and context.

As the sky cleared on my way to meet Dalmas I found myself thinking again about the implications of an electronically mediated experience of Golden Gate Park, or of anywhere for that matter. In this age of pocket-sized portable media it is possible to always be plugged-in: making calls, checking messages, watching a stranger’s home movies, listening to a friend’s band’s most recent recording. Constantly distracted from one’s immediate surroundings, it would seem that we are never to be alone with our own thoughts—never allowed to be bored. To me this is both a blessing and a curse, but I tend to view technological innovations with a certain degree of relativism and ambivalence. In many ways Golden Gate Park is itself a highly mediated experience—a late nineteenth century version of altering reality. The transformation of the park’s land from shifting sand and ocean dunes to the verdant cornucopia of horticultural specimens and painterly vistas one sees today is surely a remarkable feat of human intervention and ingenuity. I don’t mean to suggest that a park is the same as an iPod, only that they are points along a spectrum of artificiality.

If you consider… is a place where these points converge—where William Hammond Hall and John McLaren’s (the park’s primary designers) romantic vision of a civilized and picturesque nature meets new media and Dalmas’ interest in the park’s backside—its abject, mundane or otherwise overlooked spaces. The tour begins conventionally enough, with all the practiced cadence and self-effacing tone of an Ira Glass introduction: car traffic and a funky, bouncing bass note in the background; thoughtful pauses punctuating deference to the listener in the fore.

You have just begun a walking tour of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California. This tour will give you directions that you may follow at a leisurely pace through the park and will offer you suggestions on things to observe, experience, and consider. Feel free to stop the audio portion of this tour at any point and continue the tour on your own. There are many paths that can be taken and the route suggested here is merely one option…

It fast becomes apparent that the content of If you consider… is more meandering thought than any kind of traditional storytelling. The tour skips from a neighbor who tends the flowerbed at the entrance of the park, to anthropomorphizing caged water pipes, to identifying some of the park’s edible plants. Soon you’re gazing at a decrepit horseshoe pit and being asked to abandon your social mores and “give-in to the driving forces behind your nature.” Only the route and cinematic, seemingly responsive, soundtrack provide a narrative structure for If you consider… And it works. I mean I was absolutely willing to put my own impulses aside and follow Dalmas’ string of associations through what were to me lesser-known—often unknown—sites in the park. Admittedly, I find Dalmas’ do-it-yourself approach charming. I was even willing to go along with his evocation of gnomes and spirits, poetic ramblings, and habit of forcing mystery onto the most banal of objects—affectations I might otherwise find silly. In the end it’s Dalmas’ eccentricities—his eschewing of authority and narrative continuity in favor of a personally inflected, patch-work construction of place that gives If you consider… it’s power.

I remember one of my undergrad professors quipping that visiting parks was akin to visiting natural history museums. With their well-worn or paved paths, interpretive signage, points of interest, and rules of conduct both explicit and implicit it’s an apt analogy, but far too reductive for me. Such an analogy does not account for the vastness of space that parks can connect us to or the sense of calm and humility inspired by the ceaseless ebb and flow of natural phenomena. It’s not surprising that a technology designed for museums would remind me of this. What is surprising, ironic even, is that same technology resisting the process of naturalization. That is to say that human adaptability allows us to quickly assimilate new technologies, integrating them so thoroughly into our lives that they become invisible to us. We no longer see the frame but fully occupy the image. If you consider… interferes with this tendency, never concealing its fictional and constructed quality—never completely suspending disbelief. In so doing Dalmas manages to bring the fictional and constructed quality of the park into view, underscoring, for instance, the surreality of a banana plant within 50 feet of redwood trees or the disquieting feeling upon encountering a homeless encampment.

By accident or by design, the fragmentary quality of If you consider… was tempered by a few truly synergistic moments when music, text, and site blended seamlessly to form a unified experience of place. As when the live didjeridoo and bongo player began playing on cue to the narrator in my headphones, or in the joint imagining of a tree whose limbs once passed through a chain link fence and now only survive in small fragments still lodged in the fence, or in the shared reverence for the abject but majestic outdoor handball courts. In these moments Dalmas disappeared and the artificial no longer seemed primary but quite subsumed by a greater natural order of transformation and change—one in which multiple realities exist simultaneously.

One of the outdoor handball courts near the end of the tour.

If you consider… will be available indefinitely on Lulu.com. You may also purchase a CD of If you consider…and learn more about this and other projects by Jeremy Dalmas at www.theabsurdists.com