Sam Auinger – ORIGIN

Featured Artist Sam Auinger presents his projects at ORIGIN – how it all begins

admin — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:57:50 +0000

Sam Auinger talks about his fascination with acoustics, his projects at Ars Electronica 2011 and why he’s so impressed by the Neuer Dom in Linz. The presentation is german only, but english subtitles are soon to follow.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTnfMRiAr8

Linz R2

Michael Knoll — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:11:56 +0000

Sensing Place / Placing Sense – Symposium

Michael Knoll — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:30:18 +0000

Symposium und Ausstellung Im Rahmen des Ars Electronica Festivals 2011.

The mental image of the city has become more complex. Since mobile phones have become geo-social devices, location-based data is increasingly shaping the way we navigate, experience and define the urban environment.
The Symposium and the exhibition will investigate the potential of experimental and artistic forms of inquiry for helping us making sense of the city, and discuss practices that create new public infrastructures and define new places. The panels explore the sensory, structural and cultural aspects of new urban systems literacy – a re-examination of what constitutes public space in the real-time city.

Curated by Dietmar Offenhuber and Katja Schechtner
A Cooperation between afo architekturforum oberösterreich, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Ars Electronica.

03.09.2011 Sa/Sat

16:30 – 19:00
Welcome and opening notes
Gabriele Kaiser (A), afo
Stefan Mittlböck (A), Ars Electronica/Futurelab, Dietmar Offenhuber(A/USA), Curators Katja Schechtner (A)

Keynote lecture – Usman Haque (UK)

Im Anschluss Eröffnung der begleitenden Ausstellung mit Projekten u.a. von h.o, safecast.org (Pieter Franken, Sean Bonner, Joi Ito), Ebru Kurbak, Phil Salesses/Anthony DeVincenzi/Mauro Martino/César A. Hidalgo, senseable city lab (Fabien Giradin), stadtmusik (Sam Auinger, Dietmar Offenhuber, Hannes Strobl), Mahir M. Yavuz Set up: Ewald Elmecker

04.09.2011 So/Sun

10:00-12:30 Panel 1: Senses – The Perception of Urban Media

Sam Auinger (AT/DE): The Sonic Commons
Malcom McCullough (US): Attention and Ambient Information
Chris Nold (UK): Designing for Responsive Communities

14:00:16:30 Panel 2: Systems – New Infrastructures for Public Space

Usman Haque (UK): Notes on the Design of Participatory Systems – for the City or for the Planet
Joi Ito (J/USA): Safecast.org
Natalie Jeremijenko (US): What is smarter than a smart city, googlier than a google power meter, whatsier than a Whatzon, greener than a green building, wiser than nuclear monitoring committee and faster than a speeding bullet?
Jose Luis Vicente (ES): Reverse-engineering the #Spanishrevolution: on the Hybrid Infrastructures of 15M

Concept and moderated by: Dietmar Offenhuber (AT/US), Katja Schechtner (AT)

MY EYES … MY EARS …

Michael Knoll — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 07:17:43 +0000

Featured artist Sam Auinger (AT) and his long-time artistic partner Bruce Odland (US) will give a performance-lecture that takes New York as an illustration of the dissonance of visual and acoustic perception.

An Introduction to hearing

Michael Knoll — Fri, 27 May 2011 10:13:03 +0000

Our world or, rather, the one we live in (after all, who says it’s definitely ours) can be perceived in many different ways. These modes of perception are, for one thing, highly species-specific—the mole is said to have miserable eyesight; the fly’s is multifaceted; and what the dog picks up with its nose is way beyond the ken of human beings. The sense of touch can play a major role or none at all. As for hearing, there are tremendous differences here too.

Sam Auinger, the 2011 Featured Artist, is a friend of long standing who describes Ars Electronica as one of his artistic cradles. His work deals with how we hear the world, how we perceive it acoustically. Our auditory capacity occupies the center of his attention (though our ears are mounted way off to the sides of our head, which, of course, is essential to their working properly), and he attempts to register—above all to capture and reproduce—what occurs when we listen closely, or don’t for that matter.

The way hearing functions is essentially the same for all people. On the outside of our head, most of us have two ears: one left; one right. This is where sound—that is, sound waves and thus something physical, more or less condensed—enters the body and is focused by the ear’s shell-like form. And here, something pretty nifty occurs: Depending on whether the sound waves enter the ear from the front, the side or the rear, they sound different. They’re filtered, and thus, even at this early stage, we’re able to get oriented horizontally. Vertically is a little more complicated.

Next, the sound encounters the eardrum, which has several functions. For one thing, it protects the inner ear from excessive acoustic pressure; if it’s too much, this membrane can tear and then there are problems—inflammation, fluid discharge, little things like that. The eardrum also transmits sound-induced vibrations to the hammer, anvil and stirrup, tiny bones that are something like a mechanical transmission forwarding the sound to the inner ear, the spiral-shaped cochlea, where the perception of the individual frequencies, the various pitches, takes place. This is the location of the basilar membrane, a tiny foundation upon which hair cells (stereocilia) are arrayed—a certain number for each frequency; most of all in the range of the human voice so we can communicate effectively with one another. Here, a sound wave, depending on its frequency, causes particular hairs to tilt, and they, in turn, send an electrical impulse to the brain, which then says: Aha, that was an A! (If you have perfect pitch; if not, you still hear the same thing, but you just don’t know what key it’s in.) Deep within the ear canal of a disco habitué, it can happen that these tiny hairs issue a message of their own: You know what, if it’s noise you like, my friend, then I can arrange for you to hear it incessantly. And that’s how tinnitus announces its arrival.

So much for the functional principles of hearing.

Sam Auinger, My Eyes, My Ears

What Sam Auinger does is deal with the psychoacoustic side of this story. It’s like this: from a technical perspective, we all hear pretty much similarly; but in actual practice, of course, differences manifest themselves. And the artist investigates these differences. Scrutinizes tensions—not only acoustic oscillations but also the divergences between what we perceive visually and what is heard. Like dogs that sound like elephants, or singing bridges.

In conjunction with the Ars Electronica Festival, Sam Auinger will be tuning in to the wavelength of Linz’s New Cathedral and, for one night, making it the setting of his artistic endeavors. An interview with the artist will soon be posted on this site. An overview of his oeuvre to date is available online at www.samauinger.de.

100 000 M³ BEWEGTE LUFT

Michael Knoll — Thu, 12 May 2011 12:47:40 +0000

Between dusk and dawn, Sam Auinger, featured artist at Ars Electronica 2011, will impart motion to the spatial volume of Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral by means of a sound installation featuring performative elements

“100 000 m³ bewegte luft ” (2011 ) soundinstallation with performance by Sam Auinger
Soundinstallation: Sam Auinger
Soundmaterial: Sam Auinger, Tamtam (Raumfarben)
Performance: Technologies (David Moss, voc. ; Hannes Strobl, e- doublebass; Sam Auinger, electronics) and Wolfgang Kreuzhuber, organs.

CREATE YOUR WORLD – Spaces are speaking, are you listening?

Michael Knoll — Tue, 03 May 2011 17:00:49 +0000

Sam Auinger holds a keynote for Kinderuni Steyr, which takes place at AEC. He teaches how to listen, but beware, the keynote is not held in one place but moves around. Find details on the CREATE YOUR WORLD – website.

Sensing Place / Placing Sense – Exhibition

Michael Knoll — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:13:26 +0000

The Sensing Place/Placing Sense exhibition accompanies and supplements the symposium of the same name being held by afo architekturforum oberösterreich (AT), AIT Austrian Institute of Technology (AT) and Ars Electronica (AT)

The mental image of the city has become more complex – ubiquitous technologies are changing our experience of the city and challenge traditional definitions of public space.
Media art practices have played an important role in shaping, investigating and problematizing this development. The exhibition assembles seven positions exploring different sensory aspects of new urban systems. The projects focus on the visual (Place Pulse, Los Ojos Del Mundo), the auditory (Active Listening Sites), the haptic (Tunable Touch) and the kinesthetic (Sense of Patterns) space as well as electromagnetic fields that are beyond human sensory perception (iGeigie, Kazamidori).

Exhibition curated by Dietmar Offenhuber and Katja Schechtner
A Cooperation between afo architekturforum oberösterreich, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Ars Electronica.

Place Pulse by Phil Salesses (US), Anthony DeVincenzi (US) and Cesar Hidalgo (US), designers and software engineers at the MIT Media Lab, examines our visual perception of the city and poses real-time questions such as: Which neighborhoods are of cultural-historical interest? Which are safe and which aren’t?

Active Listening Sites by Stadtmusik (Sam Auinger (AT/DE), the featured artist at Ars Electronica 2011, together with Hannes Strobl (AT) and Dietmar Offenhuber (AT/US)) enables us to hear that architecture is constructed acoustics and forms the urban soundscape.

In Sense of Patterns, a print series of visualizations, Mahir M. Yavuz (TR/US) shows how differently groups of people behave in different public spaces. An effect of mobile digital devices like the Smartphone is that a large portion of the sphere in which human beings live their everyday life can no longer be registered with the senses.

With Tuneable Touch Ebru Kurbak (TR/AT) has constructed gloves that let the wearer tactilely grasp the invisible area of effectiveness of electronic devices.

Pieter Franken (JP) and Joi Ito (JP/US) take advantage of the high performance of such devices. Their iGeigie project uses smartphones to enable the Japanese population to do comprehensive mapping of the country’s radioactivity. Tourists leave behind hardly any traces. But what was it about their stay that they actually liked?

The datamining project Los Ojos del Mundo – the World’s Eyes run by senseable city lab at MIT (US) uses the metadata of vacation photos posted on photo-sharing websites to study travelers’ behavior and preferences.

Kazamidori by the Japanese-Austrian collective h.o (JP/AT) is a windsock for the internet age. In a figurative sense, of course. It shows the wind direction of virtual visitors by evaluating traffic on the symposium website.

Curators: Dietmar Offenhuber und Katja Schechtner

Exhibition architecture and spatial design: Ewald Elmecker (AT)

FEATURED ARTIST SAM AUINGER

Michael Knoll — Mon, 02 May 2011 15:44:45 +0000

Sam Auinger (AT/DE) is an acoustic conceptioneer, sound artist and composer working in Linz and Berlin. He’s the featured artist at Ars Electronica 2011. He and Bruce Odland (US) have been collaborating very productively since 1989—O+A’s emphasis is on “hearing perspective (…) thinking with the ears.”
Odland and Auinger’s forte is staging large-scale sound installations in urban public spaces that reconfigure the city’s (traffic) noise into a harmonious sound experience in real time.

Auinger also frequently works together with city planners and architects. He often attends international symposia, where he reports on his artistic work and investigations at the nexus of urban planning, architecture, media sensory perception and sound, which are also the most important aspects of his teaching activities as a professor of experimental sound design at the Berlin University of the Arts.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTnfMRiAr8
Sam Auinger talks about his projects at ORIGIN – how it all begins, credit: Ars Electronica

100000 M³ BEWEGTE LUFT

02.09.2011 Fr/Fr 20:54 – 03.09.2011 Sa/Sat 05:13
Mariendom

St. Mary’s Cathedral in Linz is Austria’s largest church, a space with extreme dimensions and volumes.
The title of Sam Auinger’s “sound installation with performative elements” that will run in this space from dusk to dawn refers to the volume of this piece of constructed cultural history.

100,000 m3 of moving air is the basis of this “model & experiential space serving as a setting for an inquiry into the self and the community in the 21st century.” This work, the interplay of sound, light, materiality and architectural form, will enable the audience to experience this space’s basic atmospheric quality.
The acoustic event set in the cathedral will be the highlight of a three-hour ZeitTon live broadcast on radio station Ö1.

Sam Auinger (sound installation, sound material, electronics), Tamtam (spatial tones), David Moss (Vocals / US), Hannes Strobl (electric double bass/ AT), Wolfgang Kreuzhuber ( organ / AT)

LINZ R2

O+A (Sam Auinger / Bruce Odland)
01.09.2011 Do/Thu – 06.09.2011 Di/Tue
Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Freiraum

Linz R2 is a real-time resonance work, a sound installation in a public space—the long, open courtyard area adjacent to the Lentos Art Museum’s entrance. Auinger and Odland’s work is an acoustic transformation experience: two resonance pipes affixed to the ends of the Lentos Museum building perform a real-time transformation of the surrounding urban soundscape into a harmonic drone sound that is made audible by two loudspeakers. The artists thereby address the question of the basic tone of urban spaces today and inquire into its interdependencies, the extent to which it can be configured, and thus its cultural connotation.

Gerd Thaller (technician / AT)

MY EYES … MY EARS …

O+A (Sam Auinger/Bruce Odland)
03.09.2011 Sa/Sat 18:00, Lentos, Auditorium

In their performance/lecture, Auinger & Odland will elaborate on the so-called sonic commons, their designation for any acoustic ambience that human beings share with one another and in which anyone can become an “earwitness” to the actions of the others. In their acoustic encounter with New York, the duo presents dual-binaural recordings, city sounds transformed live, images and commentary that clearly bring out the contradictions of visual and acoustic information.

Check out his work at www.samauinger.de!