tamtam
Urban Sounds
Exhibition – House of Electronic Art Basel
20.09.2013 – 03.11.2013
everything NO is about the attempt and the impossibility of rendering a megacity like Shanghai experienceable through its acoustic appearance.
Urban spaces are not but a conglobation of houses, industrial estates, and streets, they are an expression of a heterogeneously cultural, social, economical, and political society, and the stage of (revolutionary) transitions. The sound of European, African or Asian cities is marked by the complex matrix of their social practices. Cities have their characteristic yet hardly prehensible acoustic pattern. Since the beginning of the 20th century they have fascinated artists who initially captured the reality of the city via film or sound recordings, or like the futurists who celebrated the noise of the industrialised city as the symbol for a new society. Today’s sound artists’ interest has differentiated itself outbound from the concretely recorded sound, the focus is always on new aspects of urbanity: on meanings and memories or abstracted structures, or the work is created from the contact with the city and in interactions of the people living there.
During the artistic appropriation artists distance themselves from the urban reality or intensify it. Strategies of transmission, of sonic journalism, of emblematism, the layers of mediatisation form the artistic canon of this contact with reality, which is systematised and emphasised through the terms of urbanisation, combination, mechanisation, and globalisation.
The starting point of URBAN SOUNDS is the trinational space. Artists and institutions from the region enter into a dialogue with their tri- and international colleagues. URBAN SOUNDS presents concerts and talks along the named axis historically, and contemporary and newly initiated works from the trinational and global space in one exhibition.