01-Rob Robinek
02- Haydar Bas & Besim Tibuk
03- Renfah
04- Schaua
05- Aleksandar Vasiljevic

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06- Jürgen Plank
07- Peter Rantasa
08- Ulrike Uhlig
09- Muttermal
10- eSeL
11- Karl Leitgeb
12- Richard Crow (with Duncan Jack and Robbie)
13- Dani Gal & Achim Lengerer
14- Elisabeth Grübl

Artists: Rashad Becker (DE), Justin Bennett (GB/NL), Benjamin Bergmann (DE), Elisabeth Grübl (A), Arthur Köpcke (DE/DK), Genesis P-Orridge (USA), Ultra-red (USA), Ruszka Roskalnikowa (PL), Paula Roush/msdm (PT/GB), Mika Taanila (FIN), Annette Weisser (D)

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“Listening to music is listening to noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that is essentially political.” – Jacques Attali

Every day, we are surrounded by sound waves in the city, functional music in shopping malls, elevator music, telephone please-hold-the-line loops, and the comforting tinkles in hotel lobbies, restaurants, and doctors’ waiting rooms. Audio-branding confronts us through radio and television, but also in the slam of a car door or the crunch of a cookie. We perceive noises not only with our ears: sound waves are also absorbed by the skin, nose, mouth, and bones.

In the sixties, a standard slogan of Muzak Inc. was “Boring work is made less boring by boring music.” The intentional sound of muzak, a concept developed in the 1920s to describe functional tape music designed for specific target groups, is one of the best examples of how music and silence are used in the control and surveillance of consumer behavior in supermarkets, but also in factories, parks, clinics, and swimming pools. Here, the Foucauldian internalization of discipline and power is perfected on the level of hearing.

As John Cage stated, there is no absolute silence. Sound defines space and space allows sound to be perceived. A key approach of several works in the show, some of them new, is the mapping and unraveling of sound phenomena in the political and social fabric of urban Vienna. These methods develop a direct relationship with the city, functioning as an inventory and acoustic field guide. An exhibition on the theme of sound in public and social space cannot take place solely indoors. Research, radio transmissions and on-site institutional cooperations will expand the exhibition space of the Kunsthalle Exnergasse out over the city, the source of the material being explored.

• In her new work, produced in the venerable broadcast hall at Austrian Radio (ORF), Annette Weisser questions definitions of cultural identity.
• Based on a series of interviews in Berlin, Paris, and Vienna, Rashad Becker’s installation creates an audio feature on people’s understandings of work.
• The contribution of Fluxus artist Arthur Köpcke takes a BBC radio program to absurd lengths.
• In a text piece, Genesis P-Orridge focuses on how we can use information and strategies to fight a guerilla war against muzak.
• Artist and filmmaker Mika Taanila documents the phenomena of functional music.
• Ruszka Roskalnikowa translates familiar strategies of video surveillance to sound.
• Sound cannot always be escaped in the same way images can, as visitors experience in sculptural installations by Benjamin Bergmann and Elisabeth Grübl which push the relationship between sound waves, the body, and the space to extremes.
• As part of his ongoing cities project, Justin Bennett contributes a cartographic audio recording of Vienna.
• Urban space is analyzed by Paula Roush/msdm in terms of protest culture: including a workshop, her piece is the latest installment in her Protest Academy project.
• The installation by Ultra-red is the setting for a gathering where political activism and artistic praxis are discussed via the concrete question of how the concept of ‘poverty’ in Vienna can be differentiated and defined in acoustic terms.

To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither question nor answers, as if it weren’t the bearer of any information. This is not longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia. We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?

How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired, how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we are. What’s needed perhaps is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.

To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of the astonishment that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an apparatus capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For the astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us. What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we open doors, we go down staircases, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep. How? Why? Where? When? Why?

Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of you pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.Question your tea spoons. What is there under your wallpaper? How many movements does it take to dial a phone number?Why don’t you find cigarettes in grocery stores? Why not?It matters little to me that these questions should be fragmentary, barely indicative of a method, at most of a project. It matters a lot to me that they should seem trivial and futile: that’s exactly what makes them just as essential, if not more so, as all the other questions by which we’ve tried in vain to lay hold on our truth.

Georges Perec, Extract first published 1973