As different as the Ars Electronica Center and Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral may be in every imaginable respect, they’ll have something in common during Ars Electronica 2014: festivalgoers will be able to employ the façades of both buildings as projection surfaces.

Living Architecture

Archifon III, an audiovisual and architectural installation by Tomáš Dvořák and Dan Gregor, turns Mariendom’s windows and walls into a virtual musical instrument. It can be played with laser pointers, which activate acoustic and optical elements mounted at various stops on the façade. Suddenly, the church’s stone walls seem to come alive, to react like a resonating body.

Read more about this on our Ars Electronica Blog!

A city’s liveliness is manifested by how, when and where its inhabitants move about town. In doing do, walking is the most individual form of getting around, both with respect to direction and speed as well as in terms of style. A human being’s gait is humankind’s most individually distinctive pattern of movement. And this is a mode of individuality that we display almost exclusively in the public sphere.

Traces of Steps and Sounds

Depending of the kind of soles on walkers’ shoes and the composition of the surface they’re walking on, their particular gait produces a distinctive sound. Within Festival City, katrinem has marked out a Path of Awareness that makes walking in the city an intentional experience, and does so on multiple levels: motoric, acoustic, architectonic and atmospheric.

Guided Performances

katrinem invites festivalgoers to walk down the Path of Awareness as a member of a small group and thus partake of guided performances. And to don their most tonally expressive shoes for the occasion.

Arrival at least 10 minutes before the tour starts and previous registration recommended.

[vimeo https://vimeo.com/104045758 w=640]

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Long before German rock band The Scorpions sang about it in 1990 in connection with the fall of the Iron Curtain, the “Wind of Change” had already been blowing on the radio. For totally different reasons and a lot harder—for instance, Sam Cooke’s 1964 rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come” and Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin,” two immortal classics from the soundtrack of social change.

Daily Radio Ritual

Exactly half a century later at the 2014 Ars Electronica Festival, Ö1, the ORF – Austrian Broadcasting Company’s cultural radio station, will be broadcasting Umbrella Radio in the immediate vicinity of the Mobile Ö1 Atelier on Hauptplatz. At preset times, the Ö1 crew will ring the chimes of change and request favorably disposed festivalgoers to take part in a Change Radio ritual. It starts with the MC chalking a circle on the paving stones around the Mobile Ö1 Atelier to demarcate the broadcast’s reception range. But oddly enough, regular radio gear isn’t enough to pick it up; rain gear is what you actually need.

Under the Umbrella

The programming can be picked up only by visitors on site outfitted with Umbrella Radios. Each of these contributions by the City of Linz’s Lost & Found Office has been equipped with a tiny radio receiver and headphones. Once unfurled, they deliver crystal-clear reception within a rather intimate range. Then it’s time to lend an ear to acoustic jewels from the Ö1 Archive, a playlist selected in accordance with the Festival theme and Ö1’s autumn “Places in Transition” series: excerpts from legendary radio features and talks about change in the broadest sense of the word, complemented by Ars Electronica Festival audio productions about social activism in digital communities.

If you happen to see a torrent of merry folks from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds dancing their way through downtown Linz while lip-syncing a blaring playback of ABBA’s hit song Take A Chance on Me, then you might think that Mardi Gras is awfully late this year or mass lunacy has broken out. But never mind, what’s underway is merely a collective emotional experiment.

Not Just One Camera, Lots of Them

The point of the Ars Electronica Festival’s experiment is a large-scale Lip-Dub, though one that intentionally deviates from the classic version featuring an uncut tracking shot. Participants in this creative exercise are called upon to film themselves with their own smartphone or an action cam they’ve brought along. This is a great opportunity to vent spontaneously, since happenings that materialize out of a clear blue sky are expressly welcome.

1 Video from 1,000 Perspectives

With the festivities still in progress, the video editing terminals in the Ars Electronica Center will already be in high gear turning countless selfies from this inner city tour into the first version of a music video shot jointly from hundreds of camera angles. Multiple subsequent versions will follow, all entertainingly illustrating how differently one and the same event can be depicted via multiple shifts of perspective.

Take part!

In “Sonotopia” Hörstadt showcases Bischofshof’s urban architecture as a tonal ensemble. Individual elements such as rainspouts, sewer systems, windows and domes morph into musical instruments and coalesce into an orchestra. At this workshop staged by Hörstadt’s staff, interested members of the public will be able to try their hand at conducting this orchestra and bringing forth sound artistry with these instruments. This playful exploration of the Bischofshof’s tonal qualities is an encounter with the acoustic level of our perception of space.

The second auditory stroll with Peter Androsch in conjunction with the “Sonotopia” event resembles a walk in the clouds—after all, substantively as well as spatially, this is a matter of air. To be precise: air as a sea of sound waves ricocheting among and through the cityscape’s structures. Seen from this perspective, architects and city planners are the true sound designers. Androsch imparts this impressively.

Sound Design via Architecture

Structures configure the cityscape’s sound instrument. And quite extraordinary architects have left their marks on the neighborhood surrounding the Bischofshof, especially in the 18^th century when Jakob Prandtauer, Johann Michael Prunner and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt shaped the sound of the city. In the 19^th century, amidst what they erected, Vincenz Statz inserted St. Mary’s Cathedral, a consummate space for reverberation.

On this auditory stroll, composer and Hörstadt director Peter Androsch together with the writer Günther Androsch introduces group members to the historic architectural ensemble surrounding Bischofshof as a tonal space—one that Hörstadt acoustically showcases in “Sonotopia” and a place that truly does offer eloquent testimony to historical facts & circumstances.

Fictional Characters & Historical Personages

As the fictional setting of Hans Platzgumer’s latest novel “Korridorwelt,” the spot where protagonist Julian Ogert’s childhood literally explodes. At Bischofstraße 7, the address at which the Eichmann and Schwager families were next-door neighbors as recalled in Micha Shagrir’s documentary film “Bischofstraße 7”. Or in the form of the Baroque façades that really do tell stories with pictures.

Sonotopia Installation:THU September 4-MON September 8, 2014, 11 AM - 9 PM
Bischofshof

“Sonotopia,” a featured event in The Resounding City series, is an acoustic exploration of the historic Bishop’s Residence on Herrengasse. But NOTE: “Sonotopia” doesn’t stage a production at this venue; the premises themselves are the attraction. That’s the concept of Hörstadt. Nothing is invented; the point is to pay attention to what’s already there: the city as tonal space.

Architecture Shapes Sound

This space results from human life in all its variants interacting with a real architectural situation, which has an enormous and occasionally subtle influence on a city’s acoustics. Architecture creates spaces and surfaces that form and reflect sound. This is precisely what Hörstadt, Linz’s lab for acoustics, space and society, enables the audience of “Sonotopia” to experience and become aware of.

The Hitchcock Principle

To accomplish this, Hörstadt’s Anatol Bogendorfer and Peter Androsch have recourse to a design principle used by Alfred Hitchcock. Just as the great British director’s film sets included surrealistically enlarged or scaled-down architecture and objects in order to heighten their on-screen impact, Hörstadt stylistically accentuates individual components of the urban soundscape in staging a Resounding City event.

Resounding Rainspouts

Rainspouts, sewer systems, windows and domes are boosted to musical instruments and orchestrated. Serving as the tonal foundation is the site’s own resonance and the individual acoustic bodies as well as information from the history of the Bischofshof as a place for hearing. “Sonotopia” is accompanied by auditory strolls through the surrounding neighborhood (Auditory Stroll I: Resounding History und Auditory Stroll II: Resounding City) and a workshop.