Kubisch’s countless wire installations, which have only grown in scale since Il respiro del mare (Breath of the Ocean, 1981) and occupy a range of different spaces, ultimately brought her to a creative flashpoint: she abandoned fixed installation sites and turned her attention to exploring public spaces. She regards the city as an uncharted parallel universe made up of innumerable, ever-growing electromagnetic fields.
Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks is an ongoing project centred around electromagnetic audio tours, which the artist has executed in locations around the world since 2004. Kubisch conceives research-based tours through cities as if they were spatial musical scores, rendering audible their electromagnetic fields. These fields are omnipresent, both above and below ground, in an ever-expanding, supposedly wireless world. Using specially designed headphones, she explores selected routes together with participants, which they can navigate at their own pace—stopping, approaching or moving away from signals, thereby constantly giving rise to new sound scenarios. Some of these are contained in confined spaces, while others stretch out over larger areas. Every city has its own unique signature, which varies according to the respective electromagnetic environment. The sound structures of the accumulating fields, which are emitted by light, radar and security systems, neon signs, ATMs, buses, electric cars, and data centres, range from complex layers of high and low frequencies—scratching, beeping, roaring, deep, high, muffled, sharp, loud, soft rhythms and tones—to low humming background noise. Throughout the course of Electrical Walks, they all coalesce to produce a complex auditory identity of each place.
Christina Kubisch has designed a new version of the installation for Aachen, which will be the 98th incarnation of the series. On 20 June, Kubisch will offer a guided Electrical Walk at 2pm and again at 4:30pm, which visitors will also be able to undertake on their own from 21 June onwards using a map of the city created by the artist.
Further Information and registration
museumsdienst[at]mail.aachen.de
+49 241 432 4998
Credit: Christina Kubisch, Electrical Walks Nr. 80, 2020. © Musikprotokoll Graz. Photo: Martin Gross.