Cona events source

The night sound walk takes us on a search of silence and listening to the inaudible, during the time of the night moths yamamayu, which represent the syntropic bonds between distant and nearby territories. The night sound walk takes us into the magical world of nocturnal butterflies, which, as symbionts, represent the syntropic links between nature and culture in Tivoli Park. The series of listening scores aims to intervene in the dominant perceptual agenda and highlight the potentials of aural perception. Hearing is closely related to the capacity for a complex understanding of reality and compassion, the basis for inclusive resonance. How to listen to the invisible? How to perceive beings that do not want to be heard?

Listening to the seemingly inaudible and wandering in night landscapes (which can also be just a reduction of the visual field and listening to the tiny impulses of one’s own body and anima) addresses the sonority of the apparent silence and bioacoustics from the direction of the territory. Japanese silk moths (Antheraea yamamai) inhabit tall deciduous forests, living primarily high in the treetops. These nocturnal butterflies leave behind large light green silk cocoons. Dislocated nocturnal incomers, they managed to flee into the open canopy of the surrounding trees when the locals ventured into silk farming a century ago. Originating in the hills of Japan, they have spread across south-east Europe.

YAMAMAYU Night Wanderings drew on the artist’s ongoing poetic exploration of Japanese silk moths and moths in general, echolocation, the ability of nocturnal moths to absorb sound as protection against predators, silence, the modality of moving/not moving, and the sophistication of the personal aural field in terms of territory.

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.

The Sono-soro[walks] series approaches the diversity of situated experiences of women and LGBTIQ+2 persons walking at night. The project unfolds as a collective night walk experience following a sound score developed through a group workshop.

The primary goal of the project is to connect intersectional feminist agencies engaged in the political acts of collective listening and sounding. Sono-soro[walks] invites women and LGBTIQ+2 individuals to co-create a site-specific augmented reality soundwalk. The route and geolocation are shaped by personal experiences and relationships with the city.

The soundwalk is conceived as a shared night-time experience of walking and listening, created on the Echoes platform.

The event engages with the lives of common wild urban birds through a participatory, site-responsive soundwalk. Using written birdsong scores, the walk explores communication with non-human species and considers the urban soundscape as a shared sonic environment shaped by listening, voicing and responding.

Birds are key indicators of the environmental health of ecosystems, yet their populations are declining globally due to the climate emergency, primarily through habitat loss. The soundwalk offers participants an opportunity to listen to birds in their own world and to reflect on the reciprocal act of being heard and observed while walking and listening.

Sleep Concert is a sound event that explores the relationship between listening, sleep and consciousness. It is conceived as a shared resting space in which the boundaries between active listening and passive perception dissolve.

The sonic structure of the concert encourages participants to enter states of relaxation, drowsiness or sleep, with sound functioning as a soft, repetitive and ambient layer. The work raises questions of time, productivity and collective care, proposing sleep as a form of resistance and regeneration.

The work builds on two phenomena: synesthesia (a sensory experience where perceptual channels intertwine, and sensory information is transmitted from one sense to another) and dissociation (the ability of consciousness to temporarily withdraw from reality by creating distance from immediate physical and emotional experiences). The performance draws from two distinct yet compatible projects: An Eye That Hears (sound exhibition, Ljubljana Castle, 2012) and Corona Nights in Ljubljana (a binaural experience of sonic reality during the Covid pandemic, YouTube, 2020).

The soundwalk unfolds similarly to a cinematic narrative, in which the original sound is replaced by a different or new one, reshaping the perception of visible space. This is not a synchronous replacement of sound, but a multilayered substitution of perception, where time is a crucial component. The sound diverges significantly from the visual experience, as participants predominantly hear daytime sounds.

The effect raises awareness of environmental dissociation, referring to the separation or disruption of the connection between individuals and their natural environment. It manifests as a lack of environmental awareness and the subordination of ecological concerns to economic interests.

The soundwalk integrates the poetic dimension of Gloria Anzaldúa’s literature, weaving significant connections with mestizo and Chicana subjectivity articulated through the concepts of transfronterizo and borderlands. These notions are situated within spaces of invisible, unnatural borders and continuous crossings, inhabited by those who challenge or confront the boundaries of normalized binarity.

The work departs from a sound score that addresses otherness as a consequence of migration, queer identity and constant movement across borders, languages and cultures. It reflects site-specific acoustic ecologies alongside the symbolic dimensions of Anzaldúa’s poetry.

The event engages with the lives of common wild urban birds through a participatory, site-responsive soundwalk. Using written birdsong scores, the walk explores communication with non-human species and considers the urban soundscape as a shared sonic environment shaped by listening, voicing and responding.

Birds are key indicators of the environmental health of ecosystems, yet their populations are declining globally due to the climate emergency, primarily through habitat loss. The soundwalk offers participants an opportunity to listen to birds in their own world and to reflect on the reciprocal act of being heard and observed while walking and listening.

BesenBallett functions as a social sculpture. Its presence in urban spaces becomes a subject of active discussion through new forms of dialogue between performers and listeners or spectators.

Brooms are everyday objects and global cultural assets. Each type of broom has its own sound and handling. From an artistic perspective, every sweeping movement is a rhythmic and sonic action, simultaneously dance and music. The KEHRPARTITUR (sweeping score) forms the basis of every BesenBallett performance, consisting of various sweeping movements that recur as audible and visible elements. Each performance begins and ends with the score, allowing room in between for variation, improvisation and free sweeping.

Urban ground surfaces are mostly stone or asphalt. The architectural form and surface of action sites – where sweeping takes place – amplify and accentuate the sounds. Urban space is experienced as a dynamic living environment through the combination of sound and action. BesenBallett emerged in 2020 as a new format conceived as a social sculpture.

Ambulation is a walking performance that uses listening technologies to harvest diverse sounds from the immediate environment. Drawing on field recording techniques, Tim Shaw records acoustic sounds and electromagnetic waves as he walks. He captures, repeats, processes and mixes these sounds using his own portable equipment, creating an interactive improvisation that intertwines recorded and live sonic events.

Each performance is specific to its geographical and temporal context. The listening technologies and sound processing systems are adapted to the characteristics of each location, meaning that the project is never finished and continues to evolve with every new invitation.

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 innovative  in-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:

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 innovative  in-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:

Ambulation is a walking performance that uses listening technologies to harvest diverse sounds from the immediate environment. Drawing on field recording techniques, Tim Shaw records acoustic sounds and electromagnetic waves as he walks. He captures, repeats, processes and mixes these sounds using his own portable equipment, creating an interactive improvisation that intertwines recorded and live sonic events.

Each performance is specific to its geographical and temporal context. The listening technologies and sound processing systems are adapted to the characteristics of each location, meaning that the project is never finished and continues to evolve with every new invitation.

Untangling a Garden combines the imaginations of two parks: one of the first exotic parks in Slovenia, Rafutski Park, and the imaginary park of the Alexandrian women in Alexandria. Both emerged in the first half of the 20th century during a period of intense migration and exchange.

The installation merges sound recordings of Rafutski Park prior to its renovation with a list of exotic and invasive species and criteria defining their uniqueness. This sonic garden is populated with newspaper headlines and quotations addressing attempts to prevent women’s migration to Egypt, as well as fragments of poetry linking the imagination of the Alexandrian women with the Slovenian myth of Lepa Vida.

The work establishes an imaginary garden where plants become co-narrators and the garden itself materializes overgrown narratives and erased histories.

The TO)pot festival opens its discursive programme dedicated to soundwalking and the connections between walking, listening and critical thinking. The programme features presentations by Elena Biserna, Ida Hiršenfelder and Jacek Smolicki, followed by a discussion with invited artists and the audience.

Jacek Smolicki presents his book Soundwalking: Through Time, Space, and Technologies (Routledge, 2023) through a sound-based presentation. The publication brings together contemporary scholars, artists and thinkers and represents one of the first comprehensive studies of soundwalking, addressing environmental, ethical, social and technological concerns.

Elena Biserna proposes an itinerary through her edited volume Going Out. Walking, Listening, Soundmaking (umland, 2022), tracing interdisciplinary experiments at the intersection of walking, listening and soundmaking, and their resonance with contemporary critical spatial thinking.

In her text Exercises in Listening to the Inaudible (Acoustic Commons, Cona, 2022), Ida Hiršenfelder reflects on the notion of location, sonority and the meaning of what is heard, examining artistic approaches to listening through conversations with artists.

Walking through the city and questioning the meaning, purpose and role of walking as an artistic practice. When Honoré de Balzac published his extraordinary study The Theory of Walking in 1833, he wondered why no one before him had seriously examined the phenomenon of human walking. “Isn’t it curious,” he wrote, “that ever since humans have walked, no one has thought to ask how they walk, whether they walk at all, whether they could walk better, what they do while walking, or whether there might be a better way to reorganize, modify or analyse walking.”

These questions will guide the walk, which focuses on walking as a bodily technique and on walking performances – performative events conceived as walks by performers or audiences who thus become co-performers and participants. Borrowing from the ancient Greek Peripatetic philosophers the idea of developing thought in motion, the project centers on walking as an artistic and critical practice.

Untangling a Garden combines the imaginations of two parks: one of the first exotic parks in Slovenia, Rafutski Park, and the imaginary park of the Alexandrian women in Alexandria. Both emerged in the first half of the 20th century during a period of intense migration and exchange.

The installation merges sound recordings of Rafutski Park prior to its renovation with a list of exotic and invasive species and criteria defining their uniqueness. This sonic garden is populated with newspaper headlines and quotations addressing attempts to prevent women’s migration to Egypt, as well as fragments of poetry linking the imagination of the Alexandrian women with the Slovenian myth of Lepa Vida.

The work establishes an imaginary garden where plants become co-narrators and the garden itself materializes overgrown narratives and erased histories.

Encouragements is a sound exhibition that explores relationships between voice, listening and public space. The work is based on subtle sonic interventions that create intimate situations within everyday environments, inviting visitors to engage in slower and more attentive modes of listening.

The project is not conceived as a various artists format.

Chronolith consists of a complex multi-channel sound composition and stone slab installation. In the work, the bioacoustic group Jata C investigates the acoustics and temporal dimensions of stone structures and their sustainability and interdependence with humans.

The artists obtained the sound material for the composition via field recordings of various locations and quarries. The installation serves as a stone instrument, a sensory extension of the human body, with which the composition and the vibrations of the stones are fed back into the materiality of the slabs with the help of transducers, forming a feedback loop. During the production of the work, the artists collaborated with scientists from micropaleontology, geology and physics, and the supporter of the project, the company Marmor Hotavlje.

beepblip [Ida Hiršenfelder], a member of Jata C, wrote about the work:
To think of geological time, the time of the sailing rocks, the time of the lithosphere, and the time of the continents is to think of our insignificance in the big picture, our mortality (dust to dust), and fleeting transience. It is a realisation that might motivate us to stop the insane depletion of the Earth and instead marvel at its mighty delicacy and appreciate the innumerable entities that shaped it in the volatile space and aeons of time. The rocks from the mountains used to be the seabed. The first organic matter in soil was produced by bacteria. Much limestone on the Earth originates from the activity of coccolithophores, unicellular algae covered in calcium carbonate scales. Like us, they are both alive and dead, organic and inorganic. We know too well such distinction is needless; however, it matters what worlds world worlds.[1] It is almost impossible to find a place on the planet not dictated by humans or at least transfigured as the consequences of human interventions. To the world, a different world, ruled by reciprocity and not authority, requires internalising different questions. Jata C asks, “How can we hear a stone and its aeons?”

[1] Donna J. Haraway. Staying with Trouble. Min in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016, p. 35. “It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories.“

Multichannel Sound Installation

In the live sound event, Jata C performs Kronolit based on a precomposed score that allows for improvisation. Using a multichannel spatial sound system, sound moves between rocks and walls, resonates through the stone slabs, and evokes a tangible presence of geological time.

Live Sound Event

The installation invites visitors into a stone-based resonant space, where the sound narrative opens up a different experience of time — slow, massive, and all-encompassing. The composition interweaves sounds of cracking, grinding, vibrating, and distant echoes — embedded in a narrative of Earth that does not borrow rhythm from humans but shapes its own across the eons.