ContraDiction

City on the Net 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. "A cacophonic symphony’ is Arnold Brooks" description of his work ContraDiction. The work takes as its starting point New York’s population of more than 8 million people, and it is a collage that Brooks has mixed of sounds recorded in the streets of the city. There is a sense of loneliness, surveillance, voyeurism and paranoia in ContraDiction. Voices and sounds obliterate each other and become a backdrop that occasionally lets out fragments as clearly decipherable points. Rather than a conversation, the impression is that of a chaos of contradiction – a speech of voices against each other.

Arnold Brooks is American and was born in 1950. He has not only worked as a musician but also as a graphic artist. Brooks teaches art at several art institutions in New York and has done a large number of exhibitions in USA. The sketchy style, the obliterated and the expressiveness of the sound works are reflected in Brooks’ graphic prints and paintings.