Soundinstallation by Peter Kiefer, Germany
and Florian Dombois, Alvin Curran, Kaspar König
Art - Documentation of the Soundart piece
8 minutes Version
SoundPark
At the Federal Horticultural Show 2011 in Koblenz the so called ‘rhododendron grove’ right behind the castle was changed into a sound park with a central 21 channel sound installation and four additional sound art projects by guest sound gardeners. The installations could be heard daily and had during its half year’s duration about 3,5 Mio visitors, most of whom stayed on for quite a while to listen. They experienced a new listening in the shaped nature of this park.
In the multi channel space projection sounds circled rotated through the space of the rhododendron grove. Earth loudspeakers built sound islands on the lawn inviting to linger on and an eight channelled hour tree opened the listening space even further.
Altogether deceleration, the pleasure of the plants and the interplay of real and arranged sound could be experienced.
The topic of SoundPark was time! From the rhythms of our body like breathing and walking, the times of the day and the year, they expanded to the historical dimensions of the old trees and buildings and even further to the ages of the earth, when the river dug into the country and formed the landscape. The space- sound installation picked out different levels of the becoming and decaying of those different rhythms and time stretches of all life as its central theme.
The place itself stood for time: the rhododendron grove contained several time axis in itself – e.g. the height of the trees vertically and the old defensive wall horizontally. Much shorter spans of time could be detected in the change in nature itself.
The “SoundPark was fitted to these cycles, it changed continuously and was remixed according to the time of the year and the state of plant growths.
Sound is process – it grows – stays on – fades away
During the Federal Horticultural Show works of the sound artists Alvin Curran (Rom), Florian Dombois (Zürich), Kaspar König (Maastricht) and Tilman Küntzel (Berlin) were shown in correspondence to the main installation.
video by Juri Jansen - jurijansen.de
