From Improvisation in the Urban Realm to Glacier Sound Poetry

How do art and sound enter into dialogue with each other in the public realm? As part of KlangBildKlang, the three-day spring school “Sonic Dialogues: Intersections of Art and Sound in Public Spaces” offered a forum for early-stage researchers to explore precisely this question. Conceived by the Office of Research Support as an international forum for doctoral students and other early-stage researchers in the humanities and artistic research, Sonic Dialogues saw participants present and discuss their research in an interdisciplinary setting.

The 20 participants brought together a wide range of topics that also entered into dialogue with each other in content-related panels—such as on activism, memory work, improvisation, and digitality. Andrea Glauser, Scott Edwards, Sarah Chaker, Javier Silvestrini, Thomas Grill, and Isabel Frey from the mdw as well as Eva Hallama from the Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences contributed critical feedback as experts. The artist and scientist Åsa Helena Stjerna not only enriched the discussions during the workshop but also spoke in her keynote lecture “Sonic Entanglements” about her own artistic practice and its challenges, like in her research with scientists working in the Arctic whose data she transforms into audio-visual installations.

Visits to the ArtSocialSpace Brunnenpassage at the Yppenmarkt, the Tonspur Passage at the Museumsquartier, and the outreach program of Belvedere21 also gave participants insights into practical examples of artistic audiovisual projects in Vienna’s public space. Alongside the central research question, this spring school was concerned particularly with coming together in order to open up a forum for exchange, inspiration, and networking—especially for PhD students, who often find themselves engaged in what is a somewhat lonely writing process.

“It was perhaps due to the excitement of this being my first experience as a PhD student at a spring school that I found “Sonic Dialogues” to be an amazing three-day workshop. As the title suggests, Vienna and the mdw most certainly are spaces for sonic dialogues. Despite being so quiet (at least to an Italian’s ears), they’re filled with sounds and music in terms of their history and their locations—be it in the streets, in concert halls, or in university spaces. What I appreciated most was the absence of hierarchies during the presentations. Discussions flowed freely despite how each panel had its own respondents, allowing all participants to intervene on an equal level with each other. I had great exchanges with young scholars and professors from around the world, and I’m very glad to now have the opportunity to stay in touch with them. I’m also grateful for having been able to visit such inspiring, intermedial sound art spaces such as the Tonspur Passage at the Museumsquartier.”

Francesco Rossetti, University of Milan

“As a PhD student, I’ve spent an incredible amount of time with myself and with books, encountering locuses of identity and knowledge that I’d never have encountered otherwise. My research and practice focus on the materialities of art workshops and how, through them, it is possible to understand and communicate selfhood, otherness, critical theory, and storytelling. Although it’s incredibly fascinating to grow with the electrons of Karen Barad, the tables of Sara Ahmed, and the mushrooms of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, it’s also a solitary path—one that I share with very specific human beings here in Tokyo. My participation in the spring school was one of those precious moments where I’ve felt like part of a community. Viewed transnationally, many of us read the same books, talk about intersecting passions, and advocate for the arts in the social realm. We do all this while being radically different from each other—coming from different sides of the world, different arts, epistemologies, and points of view. In a summery Viennese ecoqueer artscape, it felt to me like all of the solitude culminates in this sort of joyful hyper-encounter, in encounters with cinematic socialist guitars, hacking percussions, dancing activisms, and glacier sound poetries.”

Chloe Paré-Anastasiadou, Tokyo University of the Arts

Watch Sonic Entaglements at the mdwMediathek