With TEMPLEXTURES D (2022), the artist Florian Hecker draws upon current research in machine listening to stage the deployment of virtual listening agents in order to make audible their “intelligence signature, the signal trace of their nonhuman brain-ear”*. Consisting of a vast dictionary of sonic material produced with a novel algorithm for texture synthesis, the single- channel, computer-generated sound piece is set against a backdrop of functional acoustic wall panels, and diffused through an industrial column array-loudspeaker system, which segments the signal into two differently directed acoustic beams. A sequencing logic transforms this database of auditory similarities and perpetual differences into the audible stream of an individual séance, commencing at every full hour.

FIELD NOTES FROM THE EUROZONE (2023) is an installation based on the book Eusociality in the EU, a collaboration between Otto Canell Watkins (10) and Robin Watkins (42). It is a book about ants and their habitats, or perhaps more so about humans and their habits, which lends an age-fluid voice to various contents of the European continent. As the world transformed during the eight years it took to complete, subjects grew and angles changed, and the book took on a form as disorderly as life itself. Part allegory, part nonsense, and using play as an essential driver, this fable-esque jumble attempts to reflect on community beyond society – with a little help from a lot of sugar. For this occasion, the book becomes a score for a free-form audioguide using voice, improvisation and found sounds, leading the visitors through the field notes and artefacts that are on display.

*Hecker, Mackay, „Synthetic Listening“, in Spectres III / Ghosts in Machine, Shelter Press, 2021.

artgenève/musique is artgenève’s platform for sound, performance, and ephemeral works.
Since 2012, more than 40 new pieces have been presented in the framework of different projects in and outside Geneva. THE MUSIC CHAMBER is artgenève/musique on-site exhibition space during the fair.