039 Urban Songline (Panoptic Footnote), 2016 – Bucharest Biennale 7, Bucharest, Romania

Translated composite image of the 360-degree view from the former fire-watchtower Foisurol de Foc in Bucharest into a billboard that is placed in the outskirts of the city. Positioning this image in the periphery of the city looking back at itself this compressed and pixelated portrait functions as a footnote to the urban landscape and a reversed ‘panopticon’ (a circular architectural structure designed for prisons invented by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century).

In collaboration with synesthete Marcia Smilack the billboard was translated into music based on the relationships of the pixels revealing subliminal structures within the city as synesthetic correlations like ‘bent-position’, ‘underpinnings’, ‘not-complimentary’ and ‘veil’ that were then mapped in a graphic synthesizer as a scoring technique to sonify Bucharest as a socio-political landscape. These colored pixels as numbers of their corresponding local Romanian paint brand were sung by Maria Hojda.

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Part of the project Urban Songlines, a utopian/dystopian series of collaborative translations of buildings, urban structures and public spaces into music through site-specific sound-generation. These performances are a way of connecting to places by listening to them as well as a research into how we use and experience the public domain and to what degree we can claim ownership over it, discussing notions of inclusion, becoming and belonging.

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Curator Niels Van Tomme. Assistent curator Charlotte Van Buylaere.