Reading the City

READING THE CITY

Led by the idea that to develop an appropriate cartography for complex spaces, I began to read the city as a three-dimensional text, a living structure. By field-recording acoustic landmarks in the public area, a subjective vector space is spanned over the city, creating individual sound-maps, through which a redefinition of urban orientation takes place. From this point a process of writing signs and drawing letters along the borderline between significant and significat started. Using psycho-geographic research new texts were written into the structure of the city, replacing names of streets by texts about the city. Assuming shape of an multidimensional book, a new relationship between sound, city, orientation and text is identified.

Concept & Realisation: Nikolaus Gansterer (in collaboration with Joerg Piringer)

Year: 2003

Material: paper cut outs, found sound cut ups, collages, …

Exhibition:

2003 „take_off2“, Steirischer Herbst, Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria

 
Publication:

„Transacoustic Research“, Nikolaus Gansterer, Joerg Piringer (Eds.) Forum Stadtpark/Graz03, Graz, 2003. ISBN: 3−901109−08−0