Conference and concert
English
Free
Listening Sites in Bonn by Sam Auinger, Berlin
My period as the first Bonn city sound artist was marked by countless walks and exploratory tours. I literally embraced the city with my two feet. The interesting thing about getting to know a city on foot is that you never leave the large, perceptible urban setting and the slow pace of movement enables a high level of attention for sensory impressions - ideal conditions for exploring a city from an aural point of view. Out of this artistic research I created “Listening Sites in Bonn”. This map is an invitation to visit various sites in Bonn and experience their auditory qualities, to consciously expand the individual perception, recognition and interpretation of urban settings/sites - our urban living space - through the aural dimension.
The auditory qualities of all listening sites on this map are mainly thought of as prototypes, which is to say that this map is also an invitation to discover other urban settings and their listening sites.
Followed by
Morning and Other Times
Performance by Ernst Karel, Boston
quadraphonic, 32 min, 2014
Morning and Other Times is a multichannel sound composition that was recorded in the city of Chiang Mai in early 2014 — a few months before the military coup which led to the current dictatorship under General Prayuth. The piece attends to the multidimensional nature of the city, not just in terms of human multiplicity, but also in terms of the ways it’s inhabited by beings of different species, and so the piece takes as its starting point the voices of nonhuman participants in the urban environment. In one recurring case, that of dogs, the voices are literally in dialogue with audible religious and political aspects of life in the city: namely the ringing of bells in temples (which are places that shelter stray dogs), and the bugle calls which emanate from a military facility on the outskirts of the city.
The piece also relies on overhearing, on listening through, in order to convey something of its setting by what is revealed in the background. When I was going through my recordings, I found that I had more than once inadvertently recorded the Thai national anthem being broadcast somewhere in the background; including them in the piece contributes to the theme of a pervasive background of nationalism and militarism.
Please see http://www.goethe.de/ins/ca/mon/ver/en14711291v.htm for further details.
