1980
Audium Project for a world as an auditory space, 1980
The concept of Audium dates from 1978. First published in German in: Vom Verschwinden der Ferne: Telekommunikation und Kunst, Dumont, Cologne, 1990.“all the activities we engage in to produce sound – from speaking a language to the way we play an instrument and how we compose – are part of a circular process” Max Neuhaus
Excerpted from a talk given at the New School for Social Research, New York, March 1982 with addenda from 1984 and 1990:
AUDIUM
Audium proposes to create the impetus and means for an international human interchange with sound. It will form an entity for verbal and nonverbal aural exchange on a global scale: an aural community.
For most of it's past, music has taken a very different form from what it has become for us today. Historically, making music has been a communal activity rather than a performance for spectators. Highly developed musics evolved as group actions, indigenous to a community, and encompassing all its members as active participants. This once widespread human sound activity - a form of aural interchange separate from the verbal articulation of ideas --has been lost in most contemporary societies.
Spoken language, the original form for language development, evolves quickly, inventing vocabulary according to its needs. The basis for the development of each of the worlds existing languages has been simply the combination of a particular group of people in vocal contact with each other trying to communicate.
The project is composed of two parts, a Telephone Concourse and Broadcast Arenas. Telephone Concourse
Audium proposes to extend the concept of the teleconference into an international public place. It will form a specialized network of teleconferences: a Telephone Concourse.
The telephone creates what we might call an acoustic or aural space --- a point of contact through sound. The nature of this telephone space itself provides a different foundation for social activity. Its visual anonymity, its nonphysical nature and its independence from geography, have provided us with a new forum for the development of human activity.
During PUBLIC SUPPLY I, two people living in different sections of New York City, who had been childhood friends but who hadn't seen each other in twenty years, recognized each others voices and had an emotional reunion on the air. To me, this crystallized the idea of the communications network I had assembled as a public place --- they met in the same way that they could have, but didn't --- on the street.
The Telephone Concourse adds an additional dimension to the previous works. It proposes a social network as well as a musical one. It might be thought of as a construction of different spaces, where each teleconference is a space in the construction and has its own particular entrances and exits. Each of these spaces is connected by "passageways" to certain other spaces in the network - -- an intricate "building" constructed from sound interconnections rather than physical ones. It is accessible from any telephone, people move between groups by changing teleconferences, they enter or leave the Concourse by picking up or putting down the telephone.
http://www.kunstradio.at/ZEITGLEICH/CATALOG/ENGLISH/neuhaus2a-e.html
