TONSPUR 59 - Krakow to Venice in 12 Hours - 8-channel sound installation, 7-part series of posters plus clock / at TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien, Museumsquartier, Vienna 2013

The Installation premiered in July 2013 in TONSPUR Kunstverein Wien (Vienna), a public outdoor location. TONSPUR is curated sound project public platform, showcasing international and Austrian artists engaged in sound art, music and auditory research and practice. 4 projects each year are shown in the passage, which is part of Museumsquartie Vienna. Krakow to Venice in 12 hours ran each day for 3 months from 21st July 2013. 8 channel installation (12 hours audio) synced in real time from 8 am – 8 pm. Multichannel audio piece is design to change perspective on the architectural structure of the location where piece is presented. Noise pollution is a common concern in today’s architecture and urban planning but at the same time city soundscape is an integral part of the identity of the location. Urban sound gives us a point of orientation on a journey. The structure of a 12-hour clock forms the basis of the immersive multichannel sound installation. In this 12 hour-long composition, the times of the recordings are synchronous with the real time of the installation’s location. “Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” maps a journey across Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia to Italy, visiting Krakow, Katowice, Bielsko-Biala, Ostrava, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Graz, Maribor, Ljubljana, Trieste and Venice. The journey was undertaken on a railway connecting Eastern and Western Europe that was built during the reign of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The project attempts to captures the unique sonic identities of the 12 cities travelled through, searching for similarities and differences. It acts as a personal and subjective audio travel guide and a clock for the journey, mapping the movement through geographical locations over the passage of time. The artist captures the city with binaural microphones; two microphones are worn in her ears as she moves through the city giving a personal time space perspective of the city soundscape. The unobtrusive microphones also bring the artist passing snippets of unguarded conversations interwoven with the unique sonic footprint of the city. The language recorded on the streets, stations, town squares and cafes is an important element of the piece; marking the transition from one country to another, it serves as a spatial and temporal reference for the traveler in a borderless Schengen Europe. “50.06465,19.94498 to 45.441058,12.320845” (set of 6 prints) is a visual record of the artist’s movement through 12 urban locations where the field recordings took place for the “Kraków to Venice in 12 hours” project. The artist as an outsider is looking for key points within the urban space, but the city imposes its structure and creates a unique pattern for each of the drawings denoting the walks. The coloured dots on the map point to locations where the recordings took place on the hour. The printed record of latitude and longitude allows the viewer to discover exact locations where audio material was recorded. The project exists on line as an interactive platform, where the listener can move through geographical locations and time listening to the field recordings and compositions on chosen parts of the journey. www.krakowtovenicein12h.co

Rites of Intent: The Participatory Dimension of the City

This paper disseminates from a keynote lecture I delivered at an international conference, Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience, held at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich in July 2010. The theme of the paper, on architecture and ritual, was in response to a specific request by the conference organisers, and is based on my earlier research interests, particularly relating to pilgrimage and conversion during the period of Early Christianity. This chapter, however, brings this background historical knowledge of architecture and ritual to the contemporary situation, arguing that we have much to learn from the ancient and medieval worlds. Highlighting particular contemporary examples, I argue that the absence of conspicuous ritualized spaces in our cities is largely the result of architects no longer being able to understand certain kinds of spatial language that can facilitate mediation between built form and modes of corporate participation – whether formal or informal. At the same time, the chapter highlights how the use of such terms as ‘ritualised space’ in contemporary architectural discourse is problematic, given that ritual – as an ‘obligatory’ form of participation - is assumed by many to conflict with the expectations of unhindered freedom that has become the mantra of much contemporary architecture. This chapter challenges this preconception by arguing that notions of ritual space in the contemporary world are at one level materially different from those of the past, given the absence of systems of politico/religious hierarchy and authority. At the same time, however, implicit in the everyday events of contemporary urban life is the raw material of richer forms of repeated action than those simply of routine. The cases presented here reveal how a hermeneutical perspective of the historic past provides a productive and creative channel for reinterpreting ritual in the contemporary city

Humanity Rearranged: The Polish and Czechoslovak Pavilions at Expo 58

This article explores the ways in which ʻcinematicʼ exhibition techniques exploited by Czechoslovak and Polish designers in schemes for the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958 can be understood as part of a new political project to produce active citizens after the trauma of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Its originality lies in extending a discussion on the work of celebrated figures like Le Corbusier and Charles and Ray Eames by scholars like Marc Treib in Space Calculated in Seconds (1996) and Beatrix Colomina in Domesticity at War (2007) to the context of Eastern Europe. It examines, for the first time, the historic coincidence of multimedia architectural and exhibition design practices on both sides of the East-West divide. Based on research in the archives of the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art and on press reports from both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, this 8,000 word article brings hitherto unresearched architecture and design practices to an international readership. Crowley takes an interdisciplinary approach by bringing contemporaneous theories of space developed by architects and theories of the image developed by film makers in Poland and Hungary to bear on exhibition design. Crowley was invited to present this research at a symposium at the Central European University in Budapest in 2010. Developed from this paper, this article appears in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, published by University of Chicago Press. In recent years, this refereed journal has become a central forum for the discussion of modernist design

Tourist product in experience economy

Przełom XX i XXI w. to rozwoju tzw. gospodarki doznań, w której podstawowym towarem stają się nie konkretne produkty, ale emocje, przeżycia i doświadczenia klientów. Turystyka była i jest swoistym "przemysłem wakacyjnych doświadczeń". W ostatnich latach jednak jeszcze wyraźniej niż do tej pory kładzie się nacisk na świadome kreowanie produktów turystycznych silnie nasyconych emocjami. Usilnie dąży się do multiplikowania oraz intensyfikacji wrażeń turystów. Do najważniejszych działań w tym zakresie zaliczono: przekształcanie infrastruktury turystycznej w unikatowe atrakcje turystyczne, wzbogacanie tradycyjnych usług/pakietów usług o dodatkowe elementy zapewniające dodatkowe doznania i satysfakcje, wykorzystanie nowoczesnych technologii wzbogacania realnej przestrzeni turystycznej o wirtualne byty (rozszerzona rzeczywistość), a także wygodnego zapisywania doświadczeń turystycznych oraz dzielenia się wrażeniami z masową publicznością.The turn of the 20th and 21st c. was marked by the development of experience economy, in which the basic commodities are not specific products, but the customers' emotions, impressions and experiences. Tourism has always been a particular "holiday experience industry". In recent years, however, the importance of the conscious creation of emotional tourist products has become even greater, we may observe continuous efforts to multiply and intensify tourism experience. The key activities to achieve this goal include transforming tourism infrastructure into unique tourism attractions, enlarging traditional services/service packages by elements providing additional emotions and satisfaction, using modern technologies in order to add virtual entities to real tourism space (augmented reality), as well as to conveniently record tourism experience and share it with the public

Listening and remembering: networked off-line improvisation for four commuters

This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation 'Listening and Remembering', a performance for four commuters using voices and sounds from the Mexico City and Paris metros. It addresses the question: how can an act of collective remembering, inspired by listening to metro soundscapes, lead to the creation of networked voice- and sound-based narratives about the urban commuting experience? The networked experience is seen here from the structural perspective (telematic setting), the sonic underground context, the ethnographic process that led to the performance, the narratives that are created in the electro-acoustic setting, the shared acoustic environments that those creations suggest, and the technical features and participants' responses that prevent or facilitate interaction. Emphasis is placed on the participants' status as non-performers, and on their familiarity with the sonic environment, as a context that allows the participation of non-musicians in the making of music through telematically shared interfaces, using soundscape and real-time voice. Participants re-enact their routine experience through a dialogical relation- ship with the sounds, the other participants, themselves, and the experience of sharing: a collective memory

Architecture, colour and images. Ideas and designs by Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Colour, imagination, inspiration, amazement. These four words very fittingly describe the work of the Viennese artist/architect Friedrich Stowasser, better known as Hundertwasser (meaning hundred water), a master of organic thinking who between 1928 and 2000 worked and lived in Vienna, Venice and New Zealand. He uses eye-catching images to convey his ideas, forcefully expressive chromatic forms and patterns that betray a strong link with a re-interpreted geometric structure. This contribution, inspired by Hundertwasser’s works, intends to study the unique relationship between creativity, imagination and architecture based on sociological, cultural and psychological principles

Menorah Review (No. 77, Summer/Fall, 2012)

A Golden Poet of Spain\u27s Golden Age -- Beyond the Second Coming -- Books in Brief: New and Notable -- Cantorial Challenges -- Jewishness in the World: A Chabad Definition -- Moreshet - From the Classics: A 1797 Wedding -- Painful Presence: Jews in Russian Music -- Zachor: Sicut Judaeis ( And Thus to the Jews

It’s not all about the music:online fan communities and collecting Hard Rock Café pins

Previous studies of music fan culture have largely centered on the diverse range of subcultures devoted to particular genres, groups, and stars. Where studies have moved beyond the actual music and examined the fashion, concerts, and collecting ephemera such as vinyl records and posters, they have tended to remain closely allied to notions of subcultural distinction, emphasizing hierarchies of taste. This paper shifts the focus in music fan studies beyond the appreciation of the music and discusses the popular fan practice of collecting souvenir pins produced and sold by the Hard Rock Café (HRC) within a framework of fan tourism. Traveling to and collecting unique pins from locations across the globe creates a fan dialogue that centers on tourism and the collecting practices associated with souvenir consumption. Collectors engage in practices such as blogging, travel writing, and administration that become important indicators of their particular expression of fandom: pin collecting. Membership requires both time and money; recording visits around the world and collecting unique pins from every café builds fans' cultural capital. This indicates an internationalization of popular fandom, with the Internet acting as a connective virtual space between local and national, personal and public physical space. The study of HRC pin collecting and its fan community suggests that HRC enthusiasts are not so because they enjoy rock music or follow any particular artist but due to the physical ephemera that they collect and the places and spaces they visit