'remote/displaced' at Ars Electronica 2020 Aalto Garden

This year's Ars Electronica Festival is taking place partly remotely, by linking presentation, performances and event from over 120 locations around the world. The presentations include invited guests from Aalto University, streaming from The Aalto Garden. 

remote/displaced allows for an immersive exploration of a virtualised physical space: Öljysäiliö 468,  a vast, decommissioned and repurposed oil tank in East Helsinki. Due to its shape and materials, its acoustics are extremely peculiar, with long reverberation times, shimmering echoes and immersive radiating patterns. In addition, it is an almost magical site for a modern sonic ritual due to its status as a relic of fossil-fuel culture, its position by the shore, and its nature, in-between a closed industrial space not meant for humans and a shell open to the surrounding land- and soundscapes, that constantly filter and reverberate in its open cavity.

The project takes the shape of a small collection of brief immersive audio-visual visits to this special remote place, exploring ways to listen to the encounter between sound, technology, space and landscape, as it emerges like a precarious ecosystem, where the boundaries between natural and artificial are constantly renegotiated and deformed by technology.

In between physical and virtual space, the brass instruments, an array of recycled sonic devices, the light, the wind and the sea waves, filtering through the holes on the metallic reverberant surfaces, transform one another.
The audience can access the various short experiences using a wide array of technologies, from VR goggles, to mobile phones or personal computers, both remotely and in situ during the festival.

The work is created by Andrea Mancianti, Roberto Fusco, Sebastian J. Schlecht,and Äänen Lumo.

Link to the video here:
https://ars.electronica.art/keplersgardens/remote-displaced/

The festival is free of charge and open for anyone interested.