In a world dominated by visual stimuli, just listening can be a haven of tranquility. The Sound Park — located in Kepler’s Gardens at the Campus of the JKU — offers the chance to relax and engage in active listening processes. Visitors are invited to close their eyes or observe the clouds passing by while attending to the rustling of the leaves in the wind, permeated by the vibrations of the silenced bells of Notre Dame, transmitted live into the park. Bill Fontana’s Silent Echoes installation makes the bells’ vibrations audible, which they continue to emit when not actively ringing, in response to their environment. The city soundscape rendered by the re-construction of Notre Dame can be experienced by festival audiences.
The installation The Eternal Return by the Peruvian artist Cristhian Avila connects us with the past through pre-Columbian instruments that are played by the wind. Depending on the local wind, the twelve instruments (chimú whistling bottles, bone flutes, antaras nazca) connect us to ancestorial knowledge,inviting visitors to listen to sounds that come from a remote time-space. The work seeks to uncover uncommon layers of information that feed from wind energy, a hidden force of nature, the dimensions and importance of which we do not usually realize. The sound spectrum of the park transports us to the Antarctica through the work Antarctic Resolution by Giulia Foscari and UNLESS, the winner of the STARTS Prize. The alarming soundscape of Antarctic ice cracking is amplified in a huge container that shakes and moves and brings those live threatening consequences of the climate crisis into the center of the festival. Through this work, we are reminded that the effects of human life on this planet cannot be ignored, not even for one second.
The huge lawn between Kepler Hall and the pond is dedicated to the work μ by the Danish artist Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm. 49 distributed particle detectors amplify the energy of muons, cosmic rays that enter the magnetic field of our earth and, while splitting, they emit mildly radioactive elements.
On Friday, September 9th, the Sound Park is taken over by the Bruckner Orchestra and transformed into a Garden for Chamber Music. The musicians wander together with the audiences, between the pieces, styles and epochs; they play under the open sky, in the sound-spaces of the impressive architecture of the JKU and under the mighty trees of the park, creating unique opportunities for extraordinary encounters.
