Interest and activity in the area of sound installation have increased dramatically over the past decade. Such an increase in involvement on the part of artists may be seen simply as a natural tendency for them to fuse various artistic areas within their exploration of technology or, even more simply, as their direct reflection of our multimedia-oriented society.
Within this seminar, practical and theoretical approaches have been introduced, considered and put into individual practice.
Over the past 50 years, the term »sound installation« has been used to describe a wide variety of interdisciplinary art-making.
The term has been adopted with reference to any number of works which in some way integrate the element of sound- generally in a non-conventional manner -and which may otherwise be hard to categorise.
This very broad use of the term has made it difficult to propose one single, clear definition for the concept of sound installation.
As part of the broader category of »installation art«, though, the term may be more exactly understood.
This category of works has been defined as an art form »which rejects concentration on one object in favour of a consideration of the relationships between a number of elements or of the interaction between things and their contexts«
In sound installation we find this particular quality of relationships expressed firstly between the audio, visual and/or architectural elements of the work and secondly between the sound and the space for which the work is conceived as well as between the sound, the space and the observer.
In SS 23, students were introduced to 20 historical installation works with sound to build a base for the development of personal approaches.
Then, different spaces at HfG were explored acoustically, producing sound with various means, like voice, objects, and loudspeakers to study and discuss the "room's reactions and behaviours".
Questions that arose from these experiences were:
What are the different levels of meaning that sound can take influenced by its environment, and what are the architectural and social implications of the artistic use of sounds in public spaces?
During the next phase, the course was introduced to different tools for the development of sound installations in public places such as:
- Transducers and exciters
- Loudspeaker cluster and environments
- Amplifiers and analog sound generators
- Programmable software like MAX/MSP, and SuperCollider
- and Digital Audio Workstations like Reaper
- and Plugins for spatialisation like IEM and Sparta.
The course then explored different public places to test and use the gained knowledge in theory and practice. Therefore, we were guests at Matthäuskirche (Vorholzstraße) and the new Werkraum Dammerstock (Herrenalber Str.) for a couple of days.
In this phase, students started to develop new installation works in situ and in close connection with changing environments and spatial circumstances.
These works will be subject to several exhibitions during the WS 23/24.