An everyday phenomenon forms an important focus of this series of works. Building vacancy has always existed; however, in the last 15 years, it has become increasingly noticeable in city centers and on the peripheries. Above the ground-level shops, some pedestrian zones are virtually deserted. Where previously discreet estate agents’ signs advertised properties as available for rent, in more recent years the banners on the facades proclaiming 'To let, no commission!' have grown larger and larger, while at the same time, a few meters further on, an office or commercial construction boom is occurring.
Within the context of the work, there is a temporary rededication of a building[1] seen as 'empty', useless in a commercial sense, over the years usually hermetically sealed off from its environment, waiting to be demolished or gutted, yet at the same time holding on to its own history, configuration and atmosphere. The intention is to use formerly commercial and social buildings fully integrated within the urban environment (offices, hospitals, department stores, hotels, local government buildings) as a setting for sound art, which due to their past are steeped in forms, architectural aesthetics, sound properties (echoes, absorption properties of spaces, etc.) and not least stories. There are vacancies like these in every city and town. Places that either stand empty for a long time or are waiting to be gutted and rededicated[2] or to be demolished until they find a new investor who will carry out the restructuring.
This 'encapsulation' in public space can sometimes take years so that after a short while passers-by no longer notice these buildings; they vanish from public perception. Within the totality of conscious urban space, a void develops: a non-place[3]. Only when the scaffolding goes up or the demolition equipment is moved in does the place return to “the public”. Gaps in perception are starting-points in the arts: here is where new territories can be entered and explored, where fundamental questions (such as the individual and their sound environment,(un)conscious acoustic soundscape) can be combined in a new way and addressed as a theme[4].
Beyond this, however, the medium of sound art should be used to produce an ephemeral work that takes as its basis precisely this 'rejected' building, created from the building and the place.
This means the history, architectural features, range of materials, and profile (open-plan offices since the 1980s, small bedrooms in the trade fair hotel, stone/marble flooring in the entrance halls of international office buildings, etc.[5]) become elements within an overall art concept. What can often be a biased, disparaging way of seeing and hearing these vacancies or even non-places in our direct vicinity should be broadened with alternative interpretation. These non-places are also opportunities.
[1] Example: A department store becomes a concert hall.
[2] Example: An old post office becomes an H&M fashion store.
[3] Although Marc Auge´’s 'Non-Places' is talking about places other than those found by me, I would venture this analogy: »Perhaps today’s artists and writers are doomed to seek beauty in 'non-places', to discover it by resisting the apparent obviousness of current events.« [Auge´, Non-Places, XXII]
[4] See on implementation: Methods, V.
[5] »Aural Architecture can also have a social meaning. For example, the bare marble floors and walls of an office lobby loudly announce the arrival of visitors by the resounding echoes of their footsteps. In contrast, thick carpeting, upholstered furniture, and heavy draperies, all of which suppress incident or reflected sounds, would mute that announcement. The aural architecture of the lobby thus determines whether entering is a public or private event.« [Blesser/Salter, ›spaces speak are you listening?‹ p.3]
In building-sound compositions, permanently unique spatial sequences are created on the basis of functional (architectural) settings, spatial concepts as anti-dedication. The broken, dysfunctional but REAL architectural concept reinforces the desire for an impressive experience by creating one or more, partly interlinked links of spatial impressions. –
{ THE BUILDING AS A LISTENING MODE INCUBATOR }
The installations, the shut-down machines, the views through glass and corridor systems, near and far, wide and narrow, empty and filled - everything floats, there are no more regularities in the architecture left behind, in the discarded use. These rooms require different listening modes or promote the alternation between listening, hearing, and eavesdropping. These leaps and constant relocations are supported by the arrangement of the loudspeakers and the spatial sound arrangements. Loudspeakers are partly hidden, partly clearly visible, sometimes both in one room - constantly creating irregular questions, restlessness in a state of silence, trust in the availability of a moment without disposition.
»[…]the very first thing we usually try is to identify the sound source and to generate a mental model about what interaction could have happened to cause the sound. At the same time, we identify the relative location of the sound source and are possibly concerned with an appropriate reaction. People who are asked to tell what they hear frequently use a description of an imagined sound source or process and only rarely a characterization of acoustic properties as they are addressed in musical listening.« [Hermmann/Ritter, ›Everyday listening is performed permanently without directing any effort to the listening process‹]
Artificial sounds recorded on location and elsewhere, as well as sounds transmitted between rooms, alternate irregularly in the maze of the entire spatial system, merge the architecture with moments of excitement, draw attention to themselves in order to lose them again, resulting in concatenations and changes of listening modes.
Listening to one's own hearing as an aesthetic strategy of individualization.
In the basement, just before the cafeteria, on the left there is a wooden door that can only be moved with difficulty in its hinges. The squeaking is deafening and modulates with the movement of the door leaf.
THIS DOOR, gets a designed sign and is written out as a "space-sound instrument". Those who try out the instrument can listen to the glissandi of the door through the entire spatial network of the basement and its spread in the stairwell, multiplying it monophonously, spatio-temporally.
Whether this is part of the composition or not is no longer important. It is the invitation to squeak audibly from afar with a door. After weeks of exhausting work in the building, this seems a meaningful metaphor for a composition that is no longer afraid of any setting, staging or interpretation.
And if you leave the building, you can find the sounds that have just been woven into the building, in the city, in the tram, in the café, perhaps at home. Once activated, the perception remains individually changed for a moment and composes its own sound space from its environment.
»What I have always found the most fascinating is the experience of having the expanded awareness facilitated by technological intervention influence perception later under more normal circumstances. The expanded awareness of studio manipulation often carries over into soundscape awareness when similar sounds are heard later.« [B. Truax]
{ MAKING AWARE OF AUDITORY WORLD PERCEPTION THROUGH THE COMPOSITION OF SPACES }
Installing loudspeakers in public spaces and colouring the latter with an additional tonal level is a very common and meanwhile escalating method of room design. But only because we realize that almost in every boutique and every supermarket an unbearably shallow loudspeaker sound contributes to the coloration of the room and the mood, the problem is not yet outlined.In the latter case, exactly the opposite happens: the place is whitewashed, the atmosphere smeared.
Oblivious to Gravity, does not want to address this. It is about making us aware of the elemental, the enveloping, the acoustic properties and peculiarities of the places where we are, where we are exposed, and which we have forgotten. At the moment of the visit, this experience is possible in the 'now'.
{ VIRTUALIZATION - THE PENDULUM SWINGS BACK - WHAT IS A NATURAL SPACE? }
While we accept the design of our acoustic environment as 'natural' (concert halls, living spaces, offices, hospitals, administration buildings), artificially generated 'worlds' such as the Internet and the immersive effect of digital games or VR applications are often considered 'unnatural'.
However, the tools and displays of the so-called new media are not part of a virtual or even second reality; they are part of an individual reality shaped by our personal perception. While many loud voices warn that contact with and the ability to perceive in the 'real' world suffers or even degenerates as a result of increasing digitalization, Oblivious to Gravity is set for a counter-position.
It is not a question of asking what is lost, but of showing what has not yet been perceived, or at least not so perceived, and how little we have exploited and developed our sensitive possibilities despite or due to ever new media descriptions of a world. The step "back" into the used up, discarded piece of world - vacancy - enables the sensory, auditory perception of one's own person and the environment in a completely constructed 'artificial' situation (= building-sound composition).
The resulting knowledge based on the sensory experience is concrete, effective and therefore "real" and suitable for everyday use, also in VR.
»Defined by its questioning, architecture is always the expression of a lack, a shortcoming, a noncompletion. It always misses something, either reality or concept. Architecture is both being and nonbeing.« [Bernard Tschumi, ›Architecture and Disjunction‹, The MIT Press, 1994.p.225]
Due to my building-sound composition series Oblivious to Gravity I have been dealing with the sound properties of buildings since 2009. During my research and preparations for the series of works, I also dealt intensively with literature on room acoustics and took part in symposia and conferences on the subject of space and architecture.
I was and am astonished at how little sound matters as a design aspect and how far the demands and reality diverge when dealing more closely with the concepts of contemporary residential and office architecture.
Architects spare no effort to convince potential customers or jurors of their 'visions' through ever more sophisticated presentations. It's all in the word, it's about the communication of visual ideas of space, the visually imagined and presented 'border crossing' with a view to the supposedly new. Apart from the representativeness or even expressiveness of these visual representations of spaces, an essential aspect of spatial perception finds virtually no place in the design or in the representation of the concept: spatial sound and thus the auditory experience of the world or from the creative perspective - world formation. Conventional presentation media are hardly suitable for depicting the relationship between space and sound.
There are very few offices that actively deal with the topic during the planning stage. The audio-visual layout is missing. Acoustics cannot be communicated through photography and renderings. It can only be experienced in real time and cannot be remembered as an image (this does not mean, however, that it cannot be remembered; on the contrary, auditory impressions are like time travel machines: 'They’re playing our song').
It would also be quite possible to read the floor plan and material data like a score and, with today's knowledge of reverberation times and functions, to judge the sound atmosphere. Unfortunately, no one takes the trouble to train this imagination in order to be able to include it in the planning work. The difference to 'conventional' designs would be immense and perceptible. When architects deal with acoustics, they are usually concerned with a normative load: soundproof windows, impact sound insulation, perforated plasterboard resonators.
As far as questions of room acoustics come into the consciousness of the planners at all, these are passed on to the acoustician, who then has to find a technical solution, which is then often integrated into the design almost reluctantly or simply retrofitted. The fact that architecture students visit buildings and public places in order to develop an auditory horizon of experience seems rather absurd. However, this would be a simple and extremely effective way to come to grips with the problem. If one asks architects, '… and how does this corridor sound to you, or this hall …?', the simplest vocabulary for the description is often missing.
The lack of terminology does not only indicate a lack of experience; one can also assume that a lack of problem awareness promotes drastic wrong decisions. Only a few come up with the idea that the design has serious conceptual weaknesses if the acoustician asks for corrections. Although rectification is legally the result of a defect, this aspect can be neglected since there seems to be virtually no serious acoustic interior design if one listens to the highly acclaimed prize-winning buildings of the present day. And so it continues. The aesthetic renewal programme of modern architecture is anchored in the visual.
In the numerous architectural manifestos there are hardly any statements about acoustics. The programmatic purification, the reduction to the 'necessary', eliminated elements from the architecture that had traditionally shaped room acoustics: friezes, coffered ceilings, stucco, curtains, carpets and sumptuous upholstered furniture.
The emptying of the room was elevated from ideal to principle. Unfortunately, the acoustic equivalent of emptiness is not silence - quite the opposite: Transparency, permeability and vastness are architectural claims that are visually realized, acoustically often leading to disasters regarding the relaxed possibility of communication or simply 'being' in these places. Stress, restlessness, forlornness are sensitivities and moods created in the noise mixes, reflections and sound emissions behind the visionary facades and within the daringly cut spaces. If one takes the self-confidence with which architectural programs have always been presented at face value, one cannot speak of this discrepancy as an incalculable consequence and side effect, but ultimately as a theatrical claim whose effects have only been partially understood.
Whether in a newly built airport terminal or a magnificent, award-winning railway station - the glass surfaces and steel girders, wood panelling and wide corridors may provide a visual impression of width and transparency, the loudspeaker systems installed at these locations have often not really been included in the overall planning. The announcements are usually hardly comprehensible or too loud, distorted or noisy, sometimes even with background noise from the speaker's booth. And then there are, again and again, room zones in which so many sound mixtures accumulate that the loudspeaker announcements can almost no longer penetrate and can only be perceived as hostile and aggressive. Conceptual room design would have to start here directly and corresponding systems (e.g. intelligent volume adjustment proportional to the total noise level, loudspeaker systems with local filtering).
Travellers have been asking themselves for a long time when this is going to happen. In the meantime, they are locked in translucent, light-flooded noise-chambers.
{kA}: Oblivious to Gravity emanates from the acoustic potential of places in the form of urban vacancies and spatializes them in the compositional development and audible manifestation of their sound implications. Michel de Certeau's approach to differentiating space and place provides a suitable framework, because it is oriented towards everyday situations. His concepts of place and space are embedded 9 in his sociological theory of everyday life.
In it, place designates the own, actually the original, which definitively separates itself from that which it is not. Compared to such a stable constellation, space is a dynamic concept. Space emerges from place, qua intervention, which makes Certeau's theoretical framework of argumentation plausible. Space is »a result of activities that give it a direction, temporise it«. The talk of guiding vectors that make space function »as an ambiguous unit of conflict programs and contractual agreements« shows clear proximity to formulations of actor-network theory.
Michel Callon and Bruno Latour assume in their texts multi-stage processes of generating agreement in networks, in the course of which different actors set up and change their interests and goals, action programmes and counter-programmes are set up and actors are newly introduced, redefined or removed10.
The assumed agreements, negotiations or, more generally, the communicative exchange pursued with the aim of establishing situations is not only to be interpreted metaphorically for the composition of an acoustic formation of space in a place: Location coordinates, measuring devices that acoustically scan the perspectives of a location, sound-generating and sound-modulating devices, in addition to the composer and other protagonists of the artistic process, represent actors who program the arrangement of spatial sounds and sound spaces as a result of their mutual influence.
Certeau's image for the transformation from place to space is the walking person, who dynamizes the geometric definition of a place. {kA}: Oblivious to Gravity practices precisely this transformation.
By turning sounds that refer to existing coordinates of places into moving, observeable objects, new vectors emerge. The compositional work emphasizes that the creation of space means, as it were, the generation of virtual space. In addition to the difference criterion of movement, which always assigns a “motionless body” to the place and a moving body to the space, Certeau, as a consequence of his basic orientation in theory of action (Handlungstheorie), focuses on actions that quasi historicize places, give them history in form of spaces.
{kA}: Oblivious to Gravity practices a kind of historicization of the sounds elicited from a place by relating them to the sounds of its use. The sounds of site use must be determined in a kind of field research in order to stage them partly as vectors,partly as opposing forces or simply as elements of movement in virtual space.
›spaces speak are you listening?‹
[9 ›Invention du Quotidien. Vol. 1‹, Arts de Faire, Paris 1980 - deutsch: Kunst des Handelns, Merve Verlag, Berlin 1988.
[10 vgl. Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer, ›Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie. Zur Koevolution von Gesellschaft, Natur und Technik.‹, Kapitel VIII. in: ›Soziale Netzwerke. Konzepte und Methoden der sozialwissenschaftlichen Netzwerkforschung‹, hrsg.Johannes Weyer, München 2000, p.187–21]
In the context of work on {kA} the question of 'framing' has become an unpredictable issue of craftsmanship and its refinement. That buildings are 'membranes' filtering the acoustic reality of their environment and shaping it into their own environment (cf. {kA}) is meanwhile a platitude of sound art, but as such a valuable and creatively necessary coordinate on the way into the incomprehensible.
The play with these clichés of interior and exterior space, urbanity, and city sounds can be understood as a compositional means of inclusion in something pre-existing. The anecdotal can no longer be avoided, since the degree of abstraction is reduced ('is it a bus?') on the one hand and blasted on the other (passers-by sound from the toilet area without windows to the street forming correspondences to frequency-modulated synthesis sounds from the corridor…) - that the narrative becomes vital for the visitor. The composer's loss of control leads to total (absurd) world formation in the recipient. Momentarily.
»[…] where meaning is derived from the order of experience rather than the order of composition. The final meaning of any sequence is dependent on the relation space/event/movement.« [Bernard Tschumi, ›Architecture and Disjunction‹, The MIT Press, 1994.p.161]