If Trees Would Cry, We Would Cry Too is a soundwalk, a site-sensitive walking activation that recalibrates the mind and body and makes them receptive to perceiving agents that have not been mourned or are impossible to mourn. The walk honours the life of Pika, the artist’s family dog companion who passed away in May 2023. It is framed by an audio recording of a walk the artist and Pika first took together in April 2008.
The artist grieves. By repeatedly walking the route, she allows memories to surface.
In seeking answers to questions of what is considered worthy of mourning in our society, how we collectively confront ecological grief, and how we can mourn other bodies, the walk includes reflections shared by Lea Leskovec, a forester, who considers experiences of death in forest environments.
If Trees Would Cry, We Would Cry Too is a soundwalk, a site-sensitive walking activation that recalibrates the mind and body and makes them receptive to perceiving agents that have not been mourned or are impossible to mourn. The walk honours the life of Pika, the artist’s family dog companion who passed away in May 2023. It is framed by an audio recording of a walk the artist and Pika first took together in April 2008.
The artist grieves. By repeatedly walking the route, she allows memories to surface.
In seeking answers to questions of what is considered worthy of mourning in our society, how we collectively confront ecological grief, and how we can mourn other bodies, the walk includes reflections shared by Lea Leskovec, a forester, who considers experiences of death in forest environments.
Tery Žeželj
She studied Dramaturgy and Performing Arts in Ljubljana and Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy at Utrecht University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminism, ecology and performing arts. She is currently employed as an assistant researcher at the University of Nova Gorica.
Kolofon / Colophon
Artist: Tery Žeželj
Photo: Matej Tomažin
Soundwalk realised in collaboration with: Lea Leskovec Sound and technical support: Blaž Pavlica Producer: Maja Vižin Production: Bunker, Ljubljana, 2023
Supported by: Ministry of Culture RS, ACT – Art, Climate, Transition, EU – Creative Europe programme: Culture
The reduced ticket price applies to secondary school students, university students, pensioners, and self-employed professionals in the cultural sector.
Ljubljana is increasingly losing touch with its cultural identity, the essential component of which is also the city’s architecture. It is crucial to keep this component alive, fostering a personal connection between people and their history.
Green Atrium of the City is a sonic exploration of an abandoned space in the middle of the city, where a green landscape is growing. A soundwalk combining art and architecture draws inspiration from a historic building designed by Jože Plečnik, begun in 1925, weaving memories of the past into the present. The Central Stadium in Bežigrad has been closed to the public since 2008. Once a public space, it is now falling into disrepair, its significance increasingly waning. Through sonority and historicization, we want to bring the inhabitants and visitors of Ljubljana closer to the degraded space of the stadium, which has been distorted from different angles by the decay of time. In its silent decay, the stadium is suspended in a timeless void, inviting ideas for its revival. Echoes of falling debris, sticks, branches, and glass scratch the texture of the air, reminding us of a once vibrant place.
The soundwalk acts as a musical intervention, breathing temporary meaning into Plečnik Stadium and reviving its resonant core. It prompts deep reflection on the preservation of cultural heritage and foregrounds the more sensory perception of space. The soundwalk focuses on the complex sound structure and acoustic characteristics of Plečnik Stadium and its environment, which, with its resonant body, acts as an instrument – the stadium not only as a space but as a live sonic entity.
Ljubljana is increasingly losing touch with its cultural identity, the essential component of which is also the city’s architecture. It is crucial to keep this component alive, fostering a personal connection between people and their history.
Green Atrium of the City is a sonic exploration of an abandoned space in the middle of the city, where a green landscape is growing. A soundwalk combining art and architecture draws inspiration from a historic building designed by Jože Plečnik, begun in 1925, weaving memories of the past into the present. The Central Stadium in Bežigrad has been closed to the public since 2008. Once a public space, it is now falling into disrepair, its significance increasingly waning. Through sonority and historicization, we want to bring the inhabitants and visitors of Ljubljana closer to the degraded space of the stadium, which has been distorted from different angles by the decay of time. In its silent decay, the stadium is suspended in a timeless void, inviting ideas for its revival. Echoes of falling debris, sticks, branches, and glass scratch the texture of the air, reminding us of a once vibrant place.
The soundwalk acts as a musical intervention, breathing temporary meaning into Plečnik Stadium and reviving its resonant core. It prompts deep reflection on the preservation of cultural heritage and foregrounds the more sensory perception of space. The soundwalk focuses on the complex sound structure and acoustic characteristics of Plečnik Stadium and its environment, which, with its resonant body, acts as an instrument – the stadium not only as a space but as a live sonic entity.
Nika van Berkel
Graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana in 2015. Shortly after, she moved from Slovenia to the Netherlands, where she works and lives. Her work explores the boundaries between architecture, landscape, sound, and art.
Karmen Ponikvar
A Slovene sound artist and researcher in electronic and electroacoustic music. She is currently studying sound at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, the Netherlands, where she studies sound's spatiality and texture.
Kolofon / Colophon
Conceptual design, field recording and composition: Nika van Berkel, Karmen Ponikvar Theoretical text: Milos Kosec Accompanying words in the soundwalk: Zala Velkavrh, Karmen Stariha Voice interpretation: Nataša Živkovič Event photo: Matej Tomažin Special thanks: Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman Production: Cona, 2024 Coproduction of premiere event: Museum of Architecture and Design
The reduced ticket price applies to secondary school students, university students, pensioners, and self-employed professionals in the cultural sector.
Ljubljana is increasingly losing touch with its cultural identity, the essential component of which is also the city’s architecture. It is crucial to keep this component alive, fostering a personal connection between people and their history.
Green Atrium of the City is a sonic exploration of an abandoned space in the middle of the city, where a green landscape is growing. A soundwalk combining art and architecture draws inspiration from a historic building designed by Jože Plečnik, begun in 1925, weaving memories of the past into the present. The Central Stadium in Bežigrad has been closed to the public since 2008. Once a public space, it is now falling into disrepair, its significance increasingly waning. Through sonority and historicization, we want to bring the inhabitants and visitors of Ljubljana closer to the degraded space of the stadium, which has been distorted from different angles by the decay of time. In its silent decay, the stadium is suspended in a timeless void, inviting ideas for its revival. Echoes of falling debris, sticks, branches, and glass scratch the texture of the air, reminding us of a once vibrant place.
The soundwalk acts as a musical intervention, breathing temporary meaning into Plečnik Stadium and reviving its resonant core. It prompts deep reflection on the preservation of cultural heritage and foregrounds the more sensory perception of space. The soundwalk focuses on the complex sound structure and acoustic characteristics of Plečnik Stadium and its environment, which, with its resonant body, acts as an instrument – the stadium not only as a space but as a live sonic entity.
Ljubljana is increasingly losing touch with its cultural identity, the essential component of which is also the city’s architecture. It is crucial to keep this component alive, fostering a personal connection between people and their history.
Green Atrium of the City is a sonic exploration of an abandoned space in the middle of the city, where a green landscape is growing. A soundwalk combining art and architecture draws inspiration from a historic building designed by Jože Plečnik, begun in 1925, weaving memories of the past into the present. The Central Stadium in Bežigrad has been closed to the public since 2008. Once a public space, it is now falling into disrepair, its significance increasingly waning. Through sonority and historicization, we want to bring the inhabitants and visitors of Ljubljana closer to the degraded space of the stadium, which has been distorted from different angles by the decay of time. In its silent decay, the stadium is suspended in a timeless void, inviting ideas for its revival. Echoes of falling debris, sticks, branches, and glass scratch the texture of the air, reminding us of a once vibrant place.
The soundwalk acts as a musical intervention, breathing temporary meaning into Plečnik Stadium and reviving its resonant core. It prompts deep reflection on the preservation of cultural heritage and foregrounds the more sensory perception of space. The soundwalk focuses on the complex sound structure and acoustic characteristics of Plečnik Stadium and its environment, which, with its resonant body, acts as an instrument – the stadium not only as a space but as a live sonic entity.
Nika van Berkel
Graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana in 2015. Shortly after, she moved from Slovenia to the Netherlands, where she works and lives. Her work explores the boundaries between architecture, landscape, sound, and art.
Karmen Ponikvar
A Slovene sound artist and researcher in electronic and electroacoustic music. She is currently studying sound at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, the Netherlands, where she studies sound's spatiality and texture.
Kolofon / Colophon
Conceptual design, field recording and composition: Nika van Berkel, Karmen Ponikvar Theoretical text: Milos Kosec Accompanying words in the soundwalk: Zala Velkavrh, Karmen Stariha Voice interpretation: Nataša Živkovič Event photo: Matej Tomažin Special thanks: Irena Pivka, Brane Zorman Production: Cona, 2024 Coproduction of premiere event: Museum of Architecture and Design
O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? [1]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.
The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.
The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.
[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.
O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? [1]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.
The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.
The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.
[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.
Spiro Mason [Dušan Zidar]
[Dušan Zidar] graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Department of Sculpture, where he also completed his postgraduate studies. In his works, he uses different media: sculpture, drawing, noise, and intermedia art. He has held several solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Education, Department of Fine Arts.
Rene Markovič
PhD, is employed at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Informatics at the University of Maribor. He also teaches at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Education at the University of Maribor. He holds a Ph.D. in physics and is actively involved in research in various fields, such as energy, biophysics, text analysis, mathematical modeling, and data mining. Additionally, he is engaged in machine learning and data analytics.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept and realisation: Spiro Mason Programme algorithm: Rene Markovič, PhDUse of the eBralec speech synthesizer, eBralec team (Amebis, Alpineon, IJS).
O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? [1]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.
The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.
The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.
[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.
O, WHAT A WORLD of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! What ineffable essences, these touchless remembering’s and unshowable reveries! And the privacy of it all! A secret theater of speechless monologue and prevenient counsel, an invisible mansion of all moods, musings, and mysteries, an infinite resort of disappointments and discoveries. A whole kingdom. where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can. A hidden hermitage where we may study out the troubled book of what we have done and yet may do. An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet nothing at all — what is it?
And where did it come from?
And why? [1]
In The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes introduces us to a poetic series of questions about invisible visions and audible silences that explore consciousness. His introduction served as inspiration for the original performance on the staircase of Cukrarna – a building rich in history, where the walls have absorbed the sonorities of the fates of Slovene modernist writers.
The work is now presented in a new location, in Navje Park in Ljubljana. The sound performance transforms into an immersion into echoes of the past, as participants create a sonic landscape through walking, evoking stored visions from the park itself. In this way, all the surfaces of the park become instruments of the visitors, amplifying the silences. The work raises more questions than it answers, reflecting Jaynes’s idea of consciousness as an intangible realm of the mind.
The technical core of the performance involves a sound sensor, a software algorithm, and a digitised database of modernist poetry. Together, these elements create a complex sonic tapestry composed of layered sounds and the inner voices of the literati.
[1] The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind, Julian Jaynes, Penguin books, 1990.
Spiro Mason [Dušan Zidar]
[Dušan Zidar] graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Department of Sculpture, where he also completed his postgraduate studies. In his works, he uses different media: sculpture, drawing, noise, and intermedia art. He has held several solo and group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Maribor, Faculty of Education, Department of Fine Arts.
Rene Markovič
PhD, is employed at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science, and Informatics at the University of Maribor. He also teaches at the Faculty of Medicine and the Faculty of Education at the University of Maribor. He holds a Ph.D. in physics and is actively involved in research in various fields, such as energy, biophysics, text analysis, mathematical modeling, and data mining. Additionally, he is engaged in machine learning and data analytics.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept and realisation: Spiro Mason Programme algorithm: Rene Markovič, PhDUse of the eBralec speech synthesizer, eBralec team (Amebis, Alpineon, IJS).
Can people become landscapes? Ancestral mountains, mother-streams, father-oaks. Do familiar places and familiar people merge in the mind? And is the landscape truly silent?
Landscape_people is a cycle of Ukrainian folklore songs, expanded into the field of electroacoustic sound. The sounds were created in collaboration with Liubov Plavska, a Ukrainian ceramic artist, instrument inventor, and singer. Each song is dedicated to an area where the artist once lived. The sound of the voice forms the main line of the landscape, with everything around gravitating towards it.
Can people become landscapes? Ancestral mountains, mother-streams, father-oaks. Do familiar places and familiar people merge in the mind? And is the landscape truly silent?
Landscape_people is a cycle of Ukrainian folklore songs, expanded into the field of electroacoustic sound. The sounds were created in collaboration with Liubov Plavska, a Ukrainian ceramic artist, instrument inventor, and singer. Each song is dedicated to an area where the artist once lived. The sound of the voice forms the main line of the landscape, with everything around gravitating towards it.
Tetiana Khoroshun
Composer, sound designer, performer, and tutor from Ukraine, working in the fields of electronic, electroacoustic, contemporary, and experimental music. She is the author of sound performances, sound installations, music for cinema, theatre, and dance performances, chamber and orchestral music. She is a co-author and performer in the electroacoustic duo Guma, a member of the First_Tape group, and works as a composer and sound designer at Daraba Studio. She leads the Sed Contra Ensemble and is a member of the Ukrainian Association of Electroacoustic Music.
How do we tune into the city? How do we recognise that the everyday soundscape of the city, enveloping us as we open a window or step onto the street, is in fact the longest and most enduring musical composition? How can we understand artistic practices of acoustic ecology and psychogeography that require active auditory awareness? How do we read and listen to such works, and how do we participate in them?
The educational programme unfolds alongside the TO)pot festival of radical soundwalks as a dedicated strand aimed at educating young people in auditory sensitisation and critical-poetic reflection. Participants listen to and document the festival programme, developing attentiveness and reflective awareness of the surrounding environment. The collective sound work produced by the participants is broadcast on Radio Študent.
Lectures within the workshop are given by Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef and Marta Medvešek.
How do we tune into the city? How do we recognise that the everyday soundscape of the city, enveloping us as we open a window or step onto the street, is in fact the longest and most enduring musical composition? How can we understand artistic practices of acoustic ecology and psychogeography that require active auditory awareness? How do we read and listen to such works, and how do we participate in them?
The educational programme unfolds alongside the TO)pot festival of radical soundwalks as a dedicated strand aimed at educating young people in auditory sensitisation and critical-poetic reflection. Participants listen to and document the festival programme, developing attentiveness and reflective awareness of the surrounding environment. The collective sound work produced by the participants is broadcast on Radio Študent.
Lectures within the workshop are given by Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef and Marta Medvešek.
Audio works by workshop participants:
Lucka Zajc: Dovolj_1
Filip Jelovšek: Topotornotopot
Naomi Uma Zorman: mal zadihi
Tadej Grum: Terapija za ušesa
Ana Lorger: Pasivistka
Veronika Rakovec: js pa ti feminist
Lara Slekovec: Restart
Sava šumi [Urška Savič]
A critic and journalist active in the field of cultural politics, also working as a photographer and radio artist. She completed her BA in Photography at FAMU Prague in 2014 and obtained her MA at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. As a self-employed cultural worker, she contributes to various publications, co-creates multimedia projects, is part of the editorial board of Fotografija magazine and teaches at the ALUO Photography Department. Between 2015 and 2019, she was an active user of the Autonomous Rog Factory.
Kolofon / Colophon
Author and workshop mentor: Urška Savič Lecturers: Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef, Marta Medvešek Photo: Matej Tomažin Workshop partner: Radio Študent
If Trees Would Cry, We Would Cry Too is a soundwalk, a site-sensitive walking activation that recalibrates the mind and body and makes them receptive to perceiving agents that have not been mourned or are impossible to mourn. The walk honours the life of Pika, the artist’s family dog companion who passed away in May 2023. It is framed by an audio recording of a walk the artist and Pika first took together in April 2008.
The artist grieves. By repeatedly walking the route, she allows memories to surface.
In seeking answers to questions of what is considered worthy of mourning in our society, how we collectively confront ecological grief, and how we can mourn other bodies, the walk includes reflections shared by Lea Leskovec, a forester, who considers experiences of death in forest environments.
If Trees Would Cry, We Would Cry Too is a soundwalk, a site-sensitive walking activation that recalibrates the mind and body and makes them receptive to perceiving agents that have not been mourned or are impossible to mourn. The walk honours the life of Pika, the artist’s family dog companion who passed away in May 2023. It is framed by an audio recording of a walk the artist and Pika first took together in April 2008.
The artist grieves. By repeatedly walking the route, she allows memories to surface.
In seeking answers to questions of what is considered worthy of mourning in our society, how we collectively confront ecological grief, and how we can mourn other bodies, the walk includes reflections shared by Lea Leskovec, a forester, who considers experiences of death in forest environments.
Tery Žeželj
She studied Dramaturgy and Performing Arts in Ljubljana and Contemporary Theatre, Dance and Dramaturgy at Utrecht University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminism, ecology and performing arts. She is currently employed as an assistant researcher at the University of Nova Gorica.
Kolofon / Colophon
Artist: Tery Žeželj
Photo: Matej Tomažin
Soundwalk realised in collaboration with: Lea Leskovec Sound and technical support: Blaž Pavlica Producer: Maja Vižin Production: Bunker, Ljubljana, 2023
Supported by: Ministry of Culture RS, ACT – Art, Climate, Transition, EU – Creative Europe programme: Culture
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
How do we tune into the city? How do we recognise that the everyday soundscape of the city, enveloping us as we open a window or step onto the street, is in fact the longest and most enduring musical composition? How can we understand artistic practices of acoustic ecology and psychogeography that require active auditory awareness? How do we read and listen to such works, and how do we participate in them?
The educational programme unfolds alongside the TO)pot festival of radical soundwalks as a dedicated strand aimed at educating young people in auditory sensitisation and critical-poetic reflection. Participants listen to and document the festival programme, developing attentiveness and reflective awareness of the surrounding environment. The collective sound work produced by the participants is broadcast on Radio Študent.
Lectures within the workshop are given by Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef and Marta Medvešek.
How do we tune into the city? How do we recognise that the everyday soundscape of the city, enveloping us as we open a window or step onto the street, is in fact the longest and most enduring musical composition? How can we understand artistic practices of acoustic ecology and psychogeography that require active auditory awareness? How do we read and listen to such works, and how do we participate in them?
The educational programme unfolds alongside the TO)pot festival of radical soundwalks as a dedicated strand aimed at educating young people in auditory sensitisation and critical-poetic reflection. Participants listen to and document the festival programme, developing attentiveness and reflective awareness of the surrounding environment. The collective sound work produced by the participants is broadcast on Radio Študent.
Lectures within the workshop are given by Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef and Marta Medvešek.
Audio works by workshop participants:
Lucka Zajc: Dovolj_1
Filip Jelovšek: Topotornotopot
Naomi Uma Zorman: mal zadihi
Tadej Grum: Terapija za ušesa
Ana Lorger: Pasivistka
Veronika Rakovec: js pa ti feminist
Lara Slekovec: Restart
Sava šumi [Urška Savič]
A critic and journalist active in the field of cultural politics, also working as a photographer and radio artist. She completed her BA in Photography at FAMU Prague in 2014 and obtained her MA at the Department of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. As a self-employed cultural worker, she contributes to various publications, co-creates multimedia projects, is part of the editorial board of Fotografija magazine and teaches at the ALUO Photography Department. Between 2015 and 2019, she was an active user of the Autonomous Rog Factory.
Kolofon / Colophon
Author and workshop mentor: Urška Savič Lecturers: Irena Pivka, Saška Rakef, Marta Medvešek Photo: Matej Tomažin Workshop partner: Radio Študent
Queuing and waiting – an imposed break in our daily lives. A time in between, a non-time, an everyday action that puts our body in a very concrete state, forces us to stop, and positions us in relations of power or vulnerability depending on the context and the purpose of waiting.
In our busy lives, waiting is an obstacle. It is not in accordance with the rhythm of our society, in which we always want to be served first, get to the goal the fastest way possible, achieve everything quickly. Waiting creates anxiety and disrupts our individualistic approach to life.
Fent Cua / While Waiting is a guided participatory walk that invites the audience to experience moments of waiting through a series of stations, easing the discomfort of waiting while simultaneously questioning the act of waiting itself.
Queuing and waiting – an imposed break in our daily lives. A time in between, a non-time, an everyday action that puts our body in a very concrete state, forces us to stop, and positions us in relations of power or vulnerability depending on the context and the purpose of waiting.
In our busy lives, waiting is an obstacle. It is not in accordance with the rhythm of our society, in which we always want to be served first, get to the goal the fastest way possible, achieve everything quickly. Waiting creates anxiety and disrupts our individualistic approach to life.
Fent Cua / While Waiting is a guided participatory walk that invites the audience to experience moments of waiting through a series of stations, easing the discomfort of waiting while simultaneously questioning the act of waiting itself.
Urša Sekirnik
She works as a dancer and performance maker in the field of contemporary performing arts. Audience participation in both process and execution is one of her central artistic interests, leading her to focus primarily on participatory performance formats.
Jou Serra
His practice operates at the intersection of performative and participatory formats, focusing on audience experience and embodied spatial perception.
Kolofon / Colophon
Artists: Urša Sekirnik, Jou Serra Photo: Matej Tomažin
Production: Emanat
Co-production: Antic Teatre, Espai de creació, Barcelona; l’Estruch – Espai de creació de les arts en viu, Sabadell; Festival Escena Poblenou, Barcelona
Partners: KUD NUM; Bunker / Stara mestna elektrarna; SVŠGUGL; Associació cultural La Visiva, Barcelona; La Poderosa, Barcelona; Public Fund of the Republic of Slovenia for Cultural Activities
Financial support: City of Ljubljana; Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
Queuing and waiting – an imposed break in our daily lives. A time in between, a non-time, an everyday action that puts our body in a very concrete state, forces us to stop, and positions us in relations of power or vulnerability depending on the context and the purpose of waiting.
In our busy lives, waiting is an obstacle. It is not in accordance with the rhythm of our society, in which we always want to be served first, get to the goal the fastest way possible, achieve everything quickly. Waiting creates anxiety and disrupts our individualistic approach to life.
Fent Cua / While Waiting is a guided participatory walk that invites the audience to experience moments of waiting through a series of stations, easing the discomfort of waiting while simultaneously questioning the act of waiting itself.
Queuing and waiting – an imposed break in our daily lives. A time in between, a non-time, an everyday action that puts our body in a very concrete state, forces us to stop, and positions us in relations of power or vulnerability depending on the context and the purpose of waiting.
In our busy lives, waiting is an obstacle. It is not in accordance with the rhythm of our society, in which we always want to be served first, get to the goal the fastest way possible, achieve everything quickly. Waiting creates anxiety and disrupts our individualistic approach to life.
Fent Cua / While Waiting is a guided participatory walk that invites the audience to experience moments of waiting through a series of stations, easing the discomfort of waiting while simultaneously questioning the act of waiting itself.
Urša Sekirnik
She works as a dancer and performance maker in the field of contemporary performing arts. Audience participation in both process and execution is one of her central artistic interests, leading her to focus primarily on participatory performance formats.
Jou Serra
His practice operates at the intersection of performative and participatory formats, focusing on audience experience and embodied spatial perception.
Kolofon / Colophon
Artists: Urša Sekirnik, Jou Serra Photo: Matej Tomažin
Production: Emanat
Co-production: Antic Teatre, Espai de creació, Barcelona; l’Estruch – Espai de creació de les arts en viu, Sabadell; Festival Escena Poblenou, Barcelona
Partners: KUD NUM; Bunker / Stara mestna elektrarna; SVŠGUGL; Associació cultural La Visiva, Barcelona; La Poderosa, Barcelona; Public Fund of the Republic of Slovenia for Cultural Activities
Financial support: City of Ljubljana; Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
Ambisonic sound event and multi-channel sound installation
The Tree Spirits| Touch sound work reflects on the life of a tree, speculating on its acoustic component, and explores the interaction of an individual part of a plant with the colony of organisms and the forest biotic community. The sound recordings give voice to the existence of a tree in its annual and life cycles which begin and end in silence. The silence anticipating the springtime resurgence of sap flow, and the silence of destruction caused by climate change, drought, and fires. Brane Zorman is one of the three winners of Palma Ars Acoustica EBU competition 2022. You can read more about the conceptualization of work in the pdf notebook (link here) or buy printed verison of the booklet (here).
The artist zeros in on the touch; touch as an expression of genuine concern and awareness of the coexistence with plants, and a destructive touch of environmental devastation. The sounds of touching a tree trunk, branches rubbing against each other, the crushing of loose bark, the foliage, the rustling of trees in the wind, water drenching the roots – an acoustic journey through the physical existence of a tree. All the way to branch breaking, tree falling and a fire, a warning of the upcoming drought which is always a hard blow to a forest habitat.
Live Sound Event
Brane Zorman performs a live adaptation of Spirit of Trees | Touch, a work that evolved over two years in different phases and intensities. The performance employs spatial ambisonic technology and Silent Disco equipment, consisting of multiple micro FM transmitters and short-range headphones operating on various frequencies. The sound immerses the listener from all directions, creating an intense sonic experience where tones blend, shift, and reshape within a 360° spherical space. The ambisonic system allows the artist to manipulate spatial layers of sound while simultaneously transmitting them through conventional stereo headphones. Listening becomes a multi-dimensional experience, dissolving the boundaries between the audience and the sonic environment.
Art Installation
The installation demonstrates, investigates, and records the changes in the electrical conductivity, which are the result of the intensive drying process of the individual tree cookies (sliced portions of a tree trunk), converting the parameters – through heat, electrical and oscillation sensors, and converters – in the visual and acoustic forms. The cookies dry up and crack. They are colonised by microbes, mould, and fungi, and in the process of decomposition change their forms. Symbolically, these newly formed tree structures confront us with the shortage of water and moisture. The composition with the recorded and processed tree sounds, produced both within the organism as well as when touched by a human or the environment, builds an emotional and dramatic narrative charged with the natural and amplified sounds comingling and entwining. A dynamic 8-channel installation pulls the listener in the very centre of a sound happening.
Ambisonic sound event and multi-channel sound installation
The Tree Spirits| Touch sound work reflects on the life of a tree, speculating on its acoustic component, and explores the interaction of an individual part of a plant with the colony of organisms and the forest biotic community. The sound recordings give voice to the existence of a tree in its annual and life cycles which begin and end in silence. The silence anticipating the springtime resurgence of sap flow, and the silence of destruction caused by climate change, drought, and fires. Brane Zorman is one of the three winners of Palma Ars Acoustica EBU competition 2022. You can read more about the conceptualization of work in the pdf notebook (link here) or buy printed verison of the booklet (here).
The artist zeros in on the touch; touch as an expression of genuine concern and awareness of the coexistence with plants, and a destructive touch of environmental devastation. The sounds of touching a tree trunk, branches rubbing against each other, the crushing of loose bark, the foliage, the rustling of trees in the wind, water drenching the roots – an acoustic journey through the physical existence of a tree. All the way to branch breaking, tree falling and a fire, a warning of the upcoming drought which is always a hard blow to a forest habitat.
Live Sound Event
Brane Zorman performs a live adaptation of Spirit of Trees | Touch, a work that evolved over two years in different phases and intensities. The performance employs spatial ambisonic technology and Silent Disco equipment, consisting of multiple micro FM transmitters and short-range headphones operating on various frequencies. The sound immerses the listener from all directions, creating an intense sonic experience where tones blend, shift, and reshape within a 360° spherical space. The ambisonic system allows the artist to manipulate spatial layers of sound while simultaneously transmitting them through conventional stereo headphones. Listening becomes a multi-dimensional experience, dissolving the boundaries between the audience and the sonic environment.
Art Installation
The installation demonstrates, investigates, and records the changes in the electrical conductivity, which are the result of the intensive drying process of the individual tree cookies (sliced portions of a tree trunk), converting the parameters – through heat, electrical and oscillation sensors, and converters – in the visual and acoustic forms. The cookies dry up and crack. They are colonised by microbes, mould, and fungi, and in the process of decomposition change their forms. Symbolically, these newly formed tree structures confront us with the shortage of water and moisture. The composition with the recorded and processed tree sounds, produced both within the organism as well as when touched by a human or the environment, builds an emotional and dramatic narrative charged with the natural and amplified sounds comingling and entwining. A dynamic 8-channel installation pulls the listener in the very centre of a sound happening.
Brane Zorman
Composer, sound and intermedia artist, sound manipulator, producer and curator. Besides composing for the theatre, intermedia and dance, he is focused on developing different strategies, techniques, dynamic and interactive models in his work relating to sound and space, recording and reinterpreting soundscapes and creating electronic and acoustic sound sculptures using sophisticated tools.
Kolofon / Colophon
Artist: Brane Zorman Consulting: Valentina Cvetkovič, Boris Semenič Curated by: Irena Pivka Vibration sensor design: Gregor Krpič Fieldwork (Trzin): Morales d.o.o., Rok Rudigaj, Boštjan Divjak Translation and editing: Melita Silič Cover photo: Brane Zorman, Irena Pivka Event photo: Sunčan Stone Organisation: Irena Pivka Public relations: Matej Tomažin Production: Cona, zavod za procesiranje sodobne umetnosti, 2021 Locations: Steklenik, galerija za zvok, bioakustiko in umetnost, MGLC, Švicarija, Program Ars, Festival IZIS Partners: MGLC Švicarija Thanks: Zavod Kersnikova 4
The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.
Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.
In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.
Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.
The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.
Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.
In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.
Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.
Augenmas [Dare Pejič]
A non-professional author, lyricist, and producer. Action+drama, his first original work, was selected as the best radio play on Radio Študent. With occasional forays into sound experimentation (as a member of the sound collective Theremidi Orchestra) and a short career as a music selector, he has remained faithful to the medium of text in various genres. His interest in soundwalks draws from media archaeology.
beepblip [Ida Hiršenfelder]
A sound artist and archivist. She makes immersive bleepy psychogeographical soundscapes with analogue electronics, DIY and modular synths, field recordings and computer manipulations. She is interested in bioacoustics, experimental music and sound spatialisation. She was a member of the Theremidi Orchestra (2011–2017) and is currently a member of the Jata C group for bioacoustics and sound ecologies. She studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept: Augenmas Screenplay and direction: Augenmas & beepblip Composition and field recording: beepblipDramaturgy: Jasmina Založnik Text review: Primož Jesenko Vocal interpretation: Lina Akif and Blaž Šef
Original music used: Avgust Danilov, Moj mili kraj (1918); Jani Golob, Moja dežela (1986); Brane Zorman, Don’t Take Our Freedom To Us! (2020), and for the purpose of satire, the arrangement of the music Majde Sepe, Šuštarski most(1969), Mešani Pevski Zbor Don Bosko Celje, Slovenska zemlja, Jakob Aljaž (2017) and Magnifico, Ko enkrat bom umrl(1995). We also used sound samples from the Freesound.org portal of the following creators with different CC licenses: joedeshon, bruno.auzet, Harris85, soundslikewillem, tjandrasounds, cabled_mess, OGsoundFX, Nox_Sound, CyrileneRossouw, Robinhood76, hugobeaumont, Bertrof, thgurdy, 13FPanská_Tolar_David, PierrotDu25, Osiruswaltz.
The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.
Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.
In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.
Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.
The Memodrom soundwalk is a compost of memories of the most beautiful city in the world. It unexpectedly guides you through a spiral of memory in which the city by the river becomes a labyrinth, and sound triggers situations that surface from oblivion.
Memodrom creates a parallel experience of the city in which public infrastructure does not serve as functional space. It merely exists only as a backdrop for the actions within the sound space. Instead of an immersive experience, we create an emersive experience. Memodrom idolises your right to forget.
In less than an hour, it exposes you to the sonic memories of generations who have experienced Ljubljana through older sound carriers. Using the “file” reproduction method, we will collectively revive these memories – from evergreen music hits to public figures overlooked by history to the city’s supposedly most invasive inhabitants.
Would you like to set aside one of your memories, too? Memodrom awaits your call.
Augenmas [Dare Pejič]
A non-professional author, lyricist, and producer. Action+drama, his first original work, was selected as the best radio play on Radio Študent. With occasional forays into sound experimentation (as a member of the sound collective Theremidi Orchestra) and a short career as a music selector, he has remained faithful to the medium of text in various genres. His interest in soundwalks draws from media archaeology.
beepblip [Ida Hiršenfelder]
A sound artist and archivist. She makes immersive bleepy psychogeographical soundscapes with analogue electronics, DIY and modular synths, field recordings and computer manipulations. She is interested in bioacoustics, experimental music and sound spatialisation. She was a member of the Theremidi Orchestra (2011–2017) and is currently a member of the Jata C group for bioacoustics and sound ecologies. She studied Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept: Augenmas Screenplay and direction: Augenmas & beepblip Composition and field recording: beepblipDramaturgy: Jasmina Založnik Text review: Primož Jesenko Vocal interpretation: Lina Akif and Blaž Šef
Original music used: Avgust Danilov, Moj mili kraj (1918); Jani Golob, Moja dežela (1986); Brane Zorman, Don’t Take Our Freedom To Us! (2020), and for the purpose of satire, the arrangement of the music Majde Sepe, Šuštarski most(1969), Mešani Pevski Zbor Don Bosko Celje, Slovenska zemlja, Jakob Aljaž (2017) and Magnifico, Ko enkrat bom umrl(1995). We also used sound samples from the Freesound.org portal of the following creators with different CC licenses: joedeshon, bruno.auzet, Harris85, soundslikewillem, tjandrasounds, cabled_mess, OGsoundFX, Nox_Sound, CyrileneRossouw, Robinhood76, hugobeaumont, Bertrof, thgurdy, 13FPanská_Tolar_David, PierrotDu25, Osiruswaltz.
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
The speculative story of the soundwalk performance garden GOround points to the problematic relationship between people and plants, which is geared to mainly benefit people. The colonialism itself and the human-mediated dispersal of plants capitalize on the subjection and exploitation of nature. It is vital to radically change this attitude if we want to deal effectively with the existential threat of ecological crisis and contemplate a brighter scenario for the future. To become more familiar with the world of plants, garden GOroundgoes into the temporal dimension. Through the prism of the journeys of these two utterly different temporalities of humans and plants, seemingly offering no possible point of encounter, it speculates on the development of a future solidarity-based coexistence of humans and plants. Plants, the most populous species on the planet, live at their own pace in their own time, walking the paths we cannot access. garden GOround will take us along the paths of a possible future scenario for our overstressed, noisy planet mirrored through the development of local greenways. Can we learn from plants to build a more solidarity-oriented future?
The audience experiences the soundwalk through specially developed headphones used as a tool to speculate the world and the sonic landscape of the future. The world is getting too loud and harmful for our sensitive ears, which have failed to adapt to aggressive frequencies. To survive outdoors, we will need headphones that will both mute and sharpen the sound image and, at the same time, take us into the acoustic narrative.
The soundwalk is broadcast on an AR (augmented reality) headset, the result of an innovativein-depth collaboration between the artist and hardware and software developers. The AR headset allows for simultaneous amplified, binaural ambient listening and audio co-composition. They also include an FM receiver module and an EMS sensor input.
The soundwalk path connects the Orangerie Park in Strasbourg and the Tivoli Park in Ljubljana, both designed during the reign of Napoleon. The featured photograph was taken in a disrupted avenue locked today between a road and a railway. It is part of a larger avenue complex in the Tivoli Park, designed by the French at the time of the Illyrian Provinces. The vocalist, dressed in a Slovene folk costume, wears original AR headphones and listens to the landscape.
A testimony form one of the participants of the AR soundwalk:
“Many thanks to the artists and the Apollonia team for this very inspiring “Sound Walk” in the Parc de l’Orangerie, so beautiful in this early spring. It was like being a little weightless. 45 minutes, with the boundaries between reality and fiction seemingly blurred.”
AUTHOR-DESIGNED AR TECHNOLOGY
The audience experiences the sound work through specially developed author-designed AR headphones, which function as an artistic-technological interface between the listener, the space, and the composition. The headphones are conceived as a speculative tool that reflects on future auditory landscapes and possible modes of orientation within acoustically overloaded environments. They are based on the premise that contemporary sonic space is increasingly shaped by noise, frequency saturation, and aggressive acoustic pressures, as a result of which listening is becoming ever more a matter of perception, protection, and selection.
The AR headphones are the result of an in-depth collaboration between the artists and hardware and software developers. Their design enables the simultaneous binaural listening of the immediate surroundings and the playback of a sound composition, thereby creating a layered and dynamic sonic situation in which real acoustic space interweaves with an artificially generated or transmitted sonic narrative. A key feature of the system is that it does not exclude the surrounding environment, but rather acoustically modulates, filters, and accentuates it, so that listening is not separated from space, but remains actively embedded within it.
The headphones include an FM receiver module, which enables the wireless transmission and reception of audio signals, as well as an input for an EMS sensor, through which the system can also be connected to biometric or bodily impulses. The device therefore functions not merely as a playback unit, but as an expanded listening apparatus that combines environmental perception, technological mediation, and compositional layering into a unified listening experience. In this sense, the work addresses not only the future of sound, but also the future of listening as a technologically supported, situated, and selective practice.
Irena Pivka
An artist and producer. She works in the areas of new media, sound and performance arts. In recent years, she has been focusing her artistic expressions on the preparations of sound-walk performances, co-authored by Brane Zorman, which, by means of transmission tools and sound pictures, through walking and listening establish space anew and reflect social reality.
Brane Zorman
A composer, sound and radio artist. His work explores the possibilities of processing, presenting, perceiving, understanding, positioning and reinterpreting sound, space and ecology. By employing analogue and digital technologies and techniques, his work traverses the fields of music, multimedia, and visual space, using both sophisticated and simple tools, strategies, methods, and interactive interpretation models, soundscapes, evolving electronic and acoustic sound sculptures.
Kolofon / Colophon
Concept, text and headphones design: Irena Pivka Sound composition and editing, sensorial headset concept: Brane Zorman Vocal: Alja Petric Voices: Lučka Počkaj, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (Slovene)Jana Wilcoxen, Alja Petric, Toni Cahunek (English)Nataša Živkovič, Suzana Koncut, Loup Abramovici (French) Proofreading, English translation: Melita Silič English editing and proofreading: Jana Wilcoxen French translation: Anne-Cécile Lamy-Joswiak French editing: Suzana KoncutPhotography, design: Matej Tomažin Illustration: Jovana DjukićHardware and software development and testing, android application: Brane Ždralo PCB printing, electronics assembling: Zdravko Janšovec Electronics assembling: Ivan Kvasič 3D printing: Cveto Kunešević, 3Dimension Headphones assembling: Staš VrenkoProduced by CONA, 2023
VITAL creates an innovative ecosystem that respects the environment and, through art, participates in the fight against global warming and air pollution.
VITAL is co-funded by the Creative Europe programme by the three-year “Strasbourg European Capital” Contract and supported by the Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia and the City of Ljubljana, Departmen of Culture.
Text sources:
Gray, Ros and Sheikh, Shela (ed.). “The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions”. Third Text32(2–3).Kunst, Bojana. “Rastlinsko življenje in prostori umetnosti: o nedostopnem in vzajemnem”. Ana Mizerit (ed.). Zasilni izhod [Exhibition catalogue]. Ljubljana: Moderna galerija, 2022.Thorsen, Line Marie (ed.). Moving Plants. Rønnebæksholm, Næstved: Narayana Press, 2017.Sagan, Dorion. “The Human is More than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New “Facts of Life”.” Theorizing the Contemporary. Fieldsights, 18 Nov 2011.Raja, Vicente. “Moving the Green: Plant Behavior in the Human World“. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Sidebottom, Kay. “Education for a More-Than-Human World”. EuropeNow 45, Nov 2021.Marder, Michael. “Resist Like a Plant! On the Vegetal Life of Political Movements“. Peace Studies Journal 5(1), Jan 2012.Brkič, Vanja. “Mestni park Tivoli: Tivolski drevoredi so bili Ljubljančanom od nekdaj v ponos“. Dnevnik, 10 Oct 2015.Strasbourg Park, https://data.strasbourg.eu/explore/dataset/lieux_arbres-remarquables/table/
