sound sculpture
curator: Matthias Böttger
acoustic cooperation: Ralf Meinz
Polish Institute in Berlin, June 2015

The piece was predicated upon using a musical language to describe architecture. In Out of tune, musical dissonance, false notes were employed to explicate contemporary architecture in terms of distortion, falsity, unmelodiousness, singing in one breath.

Out-of-tune architecture is an interpretation of Rem Koolhaas’ concept of Junkspace. He describes seamless architecture, flooding and building our cities. The process of filling every space with provisional structure is a side effect of modernisation, which disorients and consumes the landscape.

Here, Junkspace is not only a material, but also an audial substance of architecture, and the American theorist’s conception becomes translated into an acoustic experience. It transpires in space in a process of superimposition of two melodic lines: a birdsong and the artist’s singing. Drowned-out organisms would strive to sing louder, owing to which their statements lose their melodic line, become incomprehensible and shed their communicative function.

The process of mutual tuning of both statements becomes visualised, and the installation displays test print-outs, helpful in a correct system coordinates setting in 3D printers. The abstract patterns are a notation of axes, determining positions in space and tuning objects and their surroundings.

Architecture is understood here as harmonisation, and a detuning of architecture reflects the loss of ease of communication in present-day world.