2025
This work was produced in collaboration with Lydia Baumgartner, Maria Vittoria Franzini, and Karlotta Lou Bohacz
in the context of the workshop ‘Auditory Cultures’ led by Kristina Pia Hofer with Annie Goh and Mark Peter Wright.
AAEO started as an attempt to approximate a scream in its isolated form. Brief field recordings have been conducted by a team of 4 students using a parabolic microphone, a field recorder, a contact microphone, headphones and the four bodies in their respective mental and physical states.
We acknowledge that there is a powerful steering process that always already happens in the act of field recording. The objective of this project was to explore the imminent tension between differing recording and editing methods: As recording an environment is an immediate intervention, sensations such as disorientation, isolation, overstimulation or discomfort can be initiated through the choice of specific microphones. Technical manipulation through digital editing methods (like granular synthesis, delay, pan, vocoder) can achieve or amplify similar effects.
Consequently, a story resulted from the examination of the technological implications of the “horror of recording” (Mark Peter Wright) and the site-specific horror of the field-recordings’ location - the Prater amusement park in Vienna. We consider the result sonic fiction: The translation of the recording’s ambiance into a story was informed by the dramatic technological intervention on which it has been modelled and the stature, utilisation and structure of rollercoasters. Thus, AAEO developed to be the fabulating report of a horroresque machine’s consciousness and expansion as well as a scientist’s inability to seize it. Through the mode of critical speculation, the goal was to “activate what might be possible against the safety of probability.” (Isabel Stengers). It is true that absolute safety is absent from the audio traces now presented to the listener. Please note that the recordings contain shrill sounds, intense panning and, essentially, screams.