SOUND//BYTES_ electronic and digital soundworlds

Sound is everywhere – but we cannot always hear it. Artistic research into new sound materials is drawing attention to previously unheard-of things. New technologies are just as instrumental for experimental artistic work as they are sources of sound.

The forthcoming exhibition uses the term 'soundbytes' in order to deal with artistic research into new acoustic materials as well as electronic acoustic concepts and installations which use sound fragments and digital technologies in acoustically-based design.

The soundbyte stands for the smallest digital, audio-linguistic unit and serves as the foundation for sampling, transformation and re-contextualisation strategies. New dimensions of acoustic space are opened up by digital communications media to provide unusual listening experiences. Acoustic art as a concept is currently receiving fresh stimuli through new mobile communications media being tied into the mix. We encounter them daily: mobile telephones, the internet, wireless LAN and GPS. Unlike the concert situation, the listener experiences through his mobility and interactive relationship with these media, new, overlapping electronic acoustic sound and data spaces created by digital appliances and technologies.

The works of art selected for the present exhibition represent consistent and coherent studies of various acoustic materials, qualities and parameters. What matters here is not so much inventing unheard-of sounds or new musical structures but rather rediscovering available materials, changing them into sound, questioning their assumptions, restructuring them, overlapping them, re-interpreting them and placing them in an unusual context. Installations, performances, presentations, acoustic walks and interventions in the City of Oldenburg offer the visitor manifold possibilities to question echoes, sounds, rhythms, frequencies and electro-magnetic fields and to perceive everyday situations acoustically in a new way.