REALITY SOUNDTRACK

2003|Moving sound intervention in public spaces and installation.

Sound, FM radio transmitter, portable FM radio receivers.

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​Reality Soundtrack is a sound intervention for public spaces, such as post offices, passages, shopping malls, and streets. Equipping 25 or more participants, each with a single radio receiver, they walk together through parts of a city, following a given route outlined on an Intervention Map. All the radio receivers transmit the same electronic composition transmitted from a radio station with durations varying from an hour to two hours. The audible result of the action is a moving cloud of sound traveling through a city.

The goal of the intervention is to transpose a real situation in public space onto a plane of fiction. By intervening onto the perception of a random listener, the work disrupts an individual’s usual conditions of being in the city. The result of such alienation is that the listener no longer perceives reality as having immediate effect on his or her own existence but, rather, is introduced to it as an aesthetic phenomenon - a space of fiction.

By realizing Reality Soundtrack in different cities all over the world, the modalities, differences and similarities of architectural, social and psychogeographic spaces could be discovered and drawn. The general mood of a city can be felt through the act of walking the abstract cloud of sound through the city. The way the buildings and streets reflect the sound, the way the people on the street or in a mall react towards this public intervention, from the first uncontrolled spontaneous reaction, to the way authorities deal with the sudden disruption, reflects the way in which the curiosity articulates itself in different situations. All these processes give a feeling of a place - an insight into the hidden and unconscious emotion of a city.