Oliver Schneller

Polis

8-Channel Soundscape Composition (2008-09)

Commissioned by «Taswir – Pictorial Mappings of Islam and Modernity»
ha’atelier platform for philosophy and art / Berliner Festspiele
Nov. 5 2009 – Jan. 18. 2010, Martin-Gropius-Bau Berlin

Duration: 59 Minutes

This work is originally a sound installation spread over eight loud speakers created for the exhibition «Taswir – Pictorial Mappings of Islam and Modernity» conceptualized and curated by Dr. Almut Bruckstein which was presented in Berlin 2009-2010. The acoustic material consists exclusively of audio recordings produced in four different cities: Cairo, Beirut, Jerusalem and Istanbul. In each city I took extensive random walks over the course of three days, recording hundreds of sounds along the way to assemble a kind of «acoustic portrait» of each city. During these walks I kept a log of the exact times and locations of the recorded sounds. Back in the studio in Berlin I edited the recordings and superimposed the four layers, ordering the recorded material roughly according to the times they were taken. At each «cut» in the material I added a brief reverberation in order to acoustically identify the edit points. I balanced the volume levels according to the density and volume of each sound texture, occasionally letting one city step into the foreground, another time two or three cities, or at times having all four layers produce a dense but richly individualised polyphony.