As part of the exhibition Llorenç Barber. Arxiu d’escoltes, Siegfried Zielinski delivered a lecture on 29 May 2024 linked to the work of Llorenç Barber, titled “On the City as a Music Box, Instrument, and Open Spatiotemporal Machine”.
Zielinski’s lecture proposed a reflection taking Barber’s piece Ars Acustica as its starting point. It focused on the art of listening and acoustic staging in public space, particularly within urban environments.
Cities are privileged places for initiating, developing, and sustaining connections. In themselves, they are authentic networks of contacts. From a techno-sociological perspective, cities function as machines that generate cultural and artistic encounters in tactile, visual, and acoustic terms. Attractive cities thus become spaces of possibility—spatiotemporal structures where concentrated and rapid exchanges of information occur, which in turn initiate, organize, energize, and coordinate diverse and rapid decision-making processes, as well as social and cultural experiences. Clubs, churches, concert halls, urban spaces, squares, restaurants, bars, cafés, parks, and bridges communicate with those who use them and vice versa. From a media perspective, cities actively generate ideas, projections, changes, and decisions. The way we engage with them through art is decisive for our future modes of life.
The lecture applied an archaeological approach to media, alongside selected examples, to examine how these relationships have developed. Zielinski noted that the most attractive cities were already “intelligent” before the introduction of specialized AI programs. They increase the frequency of interactions among cities, residents, and visitors, yet they can also impoverish conscious encounters in the real world—the serendipity and poetry of everyday life that make the metropolis so compelling. To truly be alone in the 21st century, one should not move to the countryside but to an anonymous skyscraper in a megacity, and wear headphones in public spaces to avoid missing a single sound from the resonance chambers of the internet.
Siegfried Zielinski is Professor Emeritus of Media Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts, Michel Foucault Chair of Media Archaeology and Techno-Culture at the European Graduate School (EGS), and visiting professor at Tongji University, Shanghai.
He was founding rector (1994–2000) of the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, director of the Vilém Flusser Archive (1998–2016), and rector of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (2016–2018). Zielinski has published numerous works on the archaeology and variantology of arts and media. In collaboration with Peter Weibel, he has curated exhibitions on Vilém Flusser—The Automata of Allah—and on Ramon Llull and his thinking machines. Together with musician and composer FM Einheit, he has recently produced critically poetic sound pieces for Teodor Currentzi’s MusicAeterna platform and several German radio stations. Zielinski is an elected member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and the Academy of Science and Arts of North Rhine-Westphalia.
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