Tuned City

Posted by admin on June 6th, 2008 filed in I and I, art

The Little Helpers are going to Berlin as part of the Tuned City festival:

Tuned City - Between sound and space speculation is an exhibition and conference project planned for July 01.-05. 2008 in Berlin which proposes a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of the acoustic.

The project draws the traditions of critical discussion about urban space within the architecture and urban planning discourse–as well as its strategies and working methods–into the context of sound art. This expanded discussion reenforces the potential of the spatial and communicative properties of sound as a tool and means of urban practice.

At the foundations of this event are artists’ works and theoretical approaches which examine in a critical and sensitive way the given urban and architectural situations alongside their resulting socio-political implications, that re-use existing spaces or that conceive and open new spaces.

A dialogue will be built at the intersection of both disciplines which traces out the complex relations and interactions of space-sound, both presenting and testing new strategies, methods, possibilities and potentials of sound work within the artistic and applied context.

Tuned City is structured in two main segments – symposium and site-specific installations.

On the individual days the symposium will approach the topic from five different theoretical and spatial perspectives. Spaces built for the production and reception of sound or acoustically flawed or impossible spaces, public and semi-public urban space, finished and planned spaces, wasteland or cultivated spaces, indoors and outdoors – the chosen venues correspond with the individual topic of the day and offer plastic illustration and demonstration. Tuned City will try to break down the conventional conference format and to catalyse the discussion via the space in a mixture of academic talk, artistic presentation, performances, reports from working practice, demonstrations, and walks.

The five days will be accompanied by a dense workshop programme and a performance programme corresponding with the individual topics.

For the programme structure see dates.

Little Helpers will be installed in various sites for the duration of the Tuned City festival. I had planned to attend the festival even before I was asked to take the Little Helpers over, as many of the people presenting work fall within the focus of my PhD research (Edwin van der Heide, Brandon LaBelle, Mark Bain, Barry Blesser…). The festival’s focus on sound-space is of particular importance to the work I’m doing at the moment, in particular its intensive and extensive (or extimate to borrow a Lacanian phrase) properties. In my current and admittedly speculative work there is an emphasis on the impact of the former, intensive sound-spaces, upon behaviour and its role in constituting a mode of environmental interaction. I’m hoping to develop exactly what I mean by this over the coming summer months and will no doubt post excerpts up here from time to time. The approach taken to sound-spaces by the festival and its associated artists is of particular importance for its engagement with auditory environments and their contingency with regard to an immediate environmental infrastructure, an approach that (thankfully) problematizes what could loosely be referred to as an electro-acoustic approach to sound spatialization. There’s obviously at lot more to say on this, hopefully I’ll have it a little clearer in my head once I’m back from Berlin and have had a chance to let the dust settle into something resembling a coherent argument. Bearing all this in mind the programme of artists and speakers is particularly exciting.