Venice Open Form Pavilion of Air - New Farm

15 ECHOES

Brisbane

Download app https://explore.echoes.xyz/ and then open QR code in app.

Details https://www.recordedfields.net/installations/venice-open-form-pavilion-of-air/

Walk slowly to allow sounds to enter gradually, notice the borders of these zones where new sounds fade-in, spend time in some places to notice the long sounds develop, how the view morphs with the sound.

Padiglione Dell'aria di Venezia Modulo Aperto (Venice Open Form Pavilion of Air) is a floating roof of sound across Giardini della Biennale in Venice, triggered by GPS and accessed via a smartphone, headphones and the echoes.xyz app. Inspired by Polish architects Oskar & Zofia Hansen’s “Open Form” architectural concept (ca. 1959), this audiowork is one of 15 locations in 9 countries in the pan-European Open Form Pavilion of Air series, using sound and site-mapping to offer a playful renewal and reframing of public space as an essential place of engagement for the community. This architecture requires no walls as support, allowing the foor to simply float within the air whilst also being made of air.

By walking through different zones within Giardini della Biennale, while using your mobile phone, the Echoes app and headphones, you become a participatory listener producing a composition in real-time. Your navigation creates a unique choreography via GPS, combining and changing sounds mapped within the Giardini through the app. Hear this unique coastal and quasi-urban international arts & architecture location become transformed by the sounds forming this floating acoustic architecture, revealing an immersive, profoundly spatial and physical experience. The Pavilion has no visible presence outside the app and can only be accessed and enjoyed at Giardini della Biennale.

This piece is the final work of 15 in the Open Form Pavilion of Air series - it aims to provide a link between Umberto Eco's writing on "Opera Aperta" (Open Work) and the Hansen's Open Form Architecture - creating an overarching structure but also aperture between these points through which politics and architecture as a kind of 'opera scultpture' can meet and exchange a spatial dialogue.

An overview of the Open Form Pavilion of Air series via RTÉ Culture: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2023/0327/1366079-new-music-dublin-welcomes-you-to-the-open-form-pavilion-of-air/

Robert Curgenven

http://recordedfields.net/ Robert Curgenven creates large-scale audiovisual experiences, performances, albums and installations, that emphasize physicality, our embodied response to sound and its correspondence to location, air, weather and architecture - the underlying significance of context. His recorded output includes "Tailte Cré-Umha (Bronze Lands)" and "SIRÈNE", pipe organ works, for his Recorded Fields Editions; "Oltre" and "Built Through" for LINE imprint; and "Climata", recorded in 15 of James Turrell’s Skyspaces across 9 countries. Festival performances include Sydney Festival, Maerzmusik (Kraftwerk Berlin), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), Cork Midsummer, Ultrahang (Budapest). Works and installations produced include those for National Gallery of Australia, National Museum of Poland (Krakow), Palazzo Grassi (Venice), Transmediale (Berlin) and National Sculpture Factory (IRL). "Curgenven makes the point that sounds are fundamental to our perception of the world... hearing the complexities of a place and time is intersected by memories of the familiar which are in turn displaced and transformed.” Realtime Magazine (AUS) “Behind the music lurk such [disparate] presences as Alvin Lucier, King Tubby, Murray Schafer and Eliane Radigue.” The Wire Magazine (UK)