Careful listening is more important than making sounds happen.
(Alvin Lucier)

Sonnenpark is home to a diverse soundscape: inhabited by birds and insects, used and visited by people, crossed by the Traisen mill canal with its power station, surrounded by housing estates, roads and commercial areas; each place on the site has its own specific sound.

The exhibition reframe / refocus is dedicated to careful listening, reacting to the special acoustic conditions of the park, to entering into relationships and reinterpreting them, to inviting people to shift their focus from the eye to the ear.

Most people are used to receiving visual stimuli more actively than acoustic ones - we move in the world of reflected light, hearing is less prominent and often remains background noise. The exhibition stages the acoustic perception, providing a setting in which it becomes the center of attention, in the spirit of Max Neuhaus, who says about the function of his groundbreaking work LISTEN “…to refocus people’s aural perspectives”.

The found sounds are the starting point for the four sound installations. They will examine, transform, comment on, and enrich the park relating to the concrete conditions of the site.

Arnold Haberl aka noid
Curator | IMA Institute of Media Archeology