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Prix1997
Prix 1987 - 2007

 
 
Organiser:
ORF Oberösterreich
 


HONORARY MENTION
Anonymous Muttering



"Anonymous Muttering" is a realized intervention in the texture of a city. Like parasites, we used a pirate broadcasting station to collect the acoustic energies and materials produced by DJ's parallel to one another in various nightclubs and sent this material into our sound and stroboscope installation.

The work was developed for both an actual urban space and electronic space (Internet, Java 3D applets, RealAudio). The DJ material we obtained like this was gran-ulized by computer programs, in other words, dissolved into its smallest units, the finest particles of sound. Interfaces were provided on the Internet and locally in the city, where participants and visitors were able to interactively reassemble the gran-ulized DJ material, which is authorless to begin with, using a granular synthe-pro-gram. The interface was designed as a fold, in which the rule sets (parameters for the synthesis algorithms) for processing sound were mounted. This meant that the atomized particles could be reassembled in a new way. The audible sounds that were formed using these fold surfaces were anchored in an urban space, but the rules were distributed across the Internet.
The collaboration between an anonymously large number of participants in electronic space and the active visitors on site resulted in influencing the "composition", however, this influence could not be individually controlled. We handed over the control of the rules. The sound event jumped back and forth between local and global rule sets. Thus it was not possible to predict what would really happen with the rule sets and what the effects on the granulated sound particles would be. The analog and digital fold-overs were inextricably interlocked. And they were interlocked in such a way that the conceptual distinction between "analog" and "digital" no longer made sense, even though they could be re-determined in this situation through various forms of actions. Yet it was no longer possible to distinguish who was actually intervening, manipulating, in other words, in the archaic sense of moving something by hand, and who was acting in electronic space. It was only possible for the participants to tendentially alter their own and others' interests. This installation provided an opportunity to operate with very fine fluctuations in the movements of interests simultaneously in different contexts (local and global).