LINZ.- Each year, the Ars Electronica Festival showcases the work of a featured artist. This year, it’s Sam Auinger (AT/DE). Since the 1980s, the Linz native has been working in computer music, sound design and psychoacoustics, fields in which he has been doing pioneering work. Sam Auinger’s contributions to this year’s Ars Electronica include sound performances at St. Mary’s Cathedral, the Lentos Art Museum and afo architekturforum oberösterreich.

Sound Conceptioneer, Sound Artist and Composer
What is the sound of the architecture that surrounds us? How do the cities we live and work in sound? And what effect does this have on us? These questions occupy Sam Auinger. The sound artist, sound conceptioneer, composer and professor of experimental sound design at UdK–Berlin University of the Arts is an explorer of the audio cosmos through which we move every day. Born in Linz in 1956, Sam Auinger attended the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz and the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In 1989, he began what has been an extraordinarily productive collaborative artistic relationship with Bruce Odland (US); O+A (www.o-a.info) accentuates “hearing perspective” and “thinking with your ears.” Odland and Auinger are known primarily for large-format sound installations in urban public spaces that reformulate the city’s (traffic) noise in real time into a harmonic auditory experience. In 2005, he launched a group named stadtmusik (www.stadtmusik.org) together with architect/media artist Dietmar Offenhuber (AT/US) and bassist/composer Hannes Strobl (AT). Audiences all over the world have witnessed Sam Auinger’s performances, installations, experiments, films and videos. He often speaks at international symposia about urban planning and architecture—for instance, as 2010 keynote speaker at ESOF in Turin. In addition to his artistic activities, Sam Auinger is currently professor of experimental sound design in the UdK’s Sound Studies master’s program. Sam Auinger has been honored with numerous grants and awards, including the Culture Prize of the City of Linz (2002) and the SKE Publicity Prize (2007). In 1997, he was guest of the Berlin Artists’ Program of the DAAD and 2008-09 grant recipient at Cité International des Arts in Paris. In 2010, Sam Auinger became the City of Bonn’s first City Sound Artist.

100000 M³ BEWEGTE LUFT
Friday, September 2, 8:54 PM-Saturday, September 3, 5:13 AM / St. Mary’s Cathedral
8:54-11 PM: Sound installation, Part 1
11 PM-12:30 AM: Performative Portion / Performance
12:30-5:13 AM: Installation, Part 2
Completed in 1924, Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral has capacity for 17,000 persons in the aboveground portion and another 3,000 in the lower church (crypt), which makes it the largest church in Austria. The structure’s cross-shaped layout is modeled on the great French Gothic cathedrals. The nave is 27.5 meters long, the middle aisle 13.5 meters long, and the transept is 60 meters wide. The highest point of the interior space is 44 meters high; the top of the steeple is 134.8 meters high. The structure’s exterior length is 130 meters. In his sound installation 100000 M³ BEWEGTE LUFT (100,000 m 3 of Moving Air), Sam Auinger takes its gigantic spatial volume as a “model & experiential space serving as a setting for an inquiry into the self and the community in the 21st century.” The setting of the sun means the onset here of an extraordinary interplay of sound, light and architecture that will last all night until the break of day. The highpoint will be a 1½-hour collaborative sound performance by Sam Auinger (electronics), David Moss (vocals) and Hannes Strobl (electric double bass). A special three-hour ZeitTon program on the Austrian Broadcasting Company’s radio station Ö1 will feature a live telecast of portions of 100000 M³ BEWEGTE LUFT from Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral.

LINZ R2
O+A (Sam Auinger/Bruce Odland)
Opening: Thursday, September 1, 5 PM / Lentos Art Museum Linz, Freiraum
Friday, September 2-Tuesday, September 6, 10 AM-7 PM daily / Lentos Art Museum Linz, Freiraum
LINZ R2 is a real-time resonance work in a public space. Resonators mounted on the sides of the Lentos Art Museum facing downtown transform the sound of the city into a harmonic drone that is propagated via loudspeaker. LINZ R2 investigates the cityscape’s basic tone, the interrelationships that engender it and, above all, the extent to which it can be formed and its cultural connotations.

MY EYES … MY EARS …
O+A (Sam Auinger/Bruce Odland)
Thursday, September 1-Tuesday, September 6 / Lentos Art Museum Linz, Auditorium
“Sonic commons” refers to the tonal ambience that we share with one another on a daily basis. In “MY EYES … MY EARS …” Bruce Odland (US) and Sam Auinger explore our acoustic coexistence. Using images, sounds and commentary, “MY EYES … MY EARS …” focuses on the dissonances between visual and acoustic information.

Active Listening Sites
Opening: Saturday, September 3, 7:30 PM / afo architekturforum oberösterreich (exhibition Sensing Place/Placing Sense)
Sunday, September 4-Saturday, October 22 / afo architekturforum oberösterreich
The SENSING PLACE/PLACING SENSE exhibition complements and accompanies the symposium of the same name hosted by afo architekturforum oberösterreich, AIT Austrian Institute of Technology and Ars Electronica. ACTIVE LISTINING SITES by Sam Auinger, Hannes Strobl and Dietmar Offenhuber demonstrate that architecture is constructed acoustics and thus configures the urban soundscape.

Räume sprechen, hörst Du sie?
Thursday, September 1, 2-4 PM / Ars Electronica Quarter, Seminar Room
RÄUME SPRECHEN, HÖRST DU SIE? (Spaces Speak. Do You Hear Them?) is a journey of discovery for young people. Sam Auinger invites you to go for a stroll to special acoustic locations and perform simple experiments to reveal why the world sounds the way we hear it and how we can think with our ears.

Origin – How It All Begins
Ars Electronica 2011 will be dedicated to the fascinating world of leading-edge research on the basic principles of the cosmos. This year’s festival is being produced in collaboration with CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. With the search for the origin of all matter as its point of departure, Ars Electronica will be scrutinizing the CERN Model and the framework conditions necessary for new things to take shape. Art and science have a great deal in common here—no longer only variant manifestations of the human longing for insight, they are guarantors and indicators of a society’s openness and its capacity to innovate and develop.