The listening posts of Technical Breakdown install sound art in the city, and mix it with everyday soundscapes. In the listening post City on the Net, the exhibition moves on to other cultures, other cities and countries. The cities are brought into private homes. The most comprehensive studies and far-reaching sound art projects are presented in City on the Net. All of them with long playing times and all of them exploring the social as a main theme. The unwanted, accidental, intrusive and violent sounds – the noises of the densely populated city became an art object in itself as early as 1913, with Luigi Russolo’s futuristic manifest L’arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise). Since then, the effort to integrate real life sounds into sound art has developed in many different directions. The common denominator for this listening post is the collage form, the zapping and the cacophonic.
Scale is the main fascination in Millionth. The work consists of recordings of the first greeting over the telephone. James Chinneck has attempted to do an acoustic map of the world by calling thousands of random persons in 227 countries. He has worked from the scale 1:1000000 and has reached the conclusion that 6348 persons are representative of the world’s population. This absurd, almost obsessive mapping takes the form of a sound mosaic, where the sense of eternity and small, discrete variations over the same theme illustrates Chinneck’s point about the homogeneous in the heterogeneous.
James Chinneck is English and was born in 1973. He is educated as a graphic artist and has worked with both sculpture and sound. Throughout the last ten years, Chinneck has worked with the social and tourism as areas of investigation. Chinneck has a comprehensive series of exhibitions behind him in USA and Europe.
