Sound and auditory experience as platforms for social meeting, urban intervention and environmental investigation.
Organized as a temporary working group, the Manual project set out to explore sound and auditory experience as platforms for social meeting, urban intervention and environmental investigation. Developed in collaboration with Atelier Nord and the Ultima festival and staged in Oslo in 2009, the project brought together six artists from around Europe engaged in experimental media practices. The project functioned as a series of process-oriented field studies of the city, involving locational research, performative actions and public discussion. Such an approach aimed to use sound as a process of temporal and social exchange. The works involved supplemented objective perspectives with face-to-face interactions, secret interventions, and transmissions so as to bring forward amplifications of city life.
The publication includes artistic works and materials by participating artists (Siri Austeen,
Brandon LaBelle,
Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Kristina Lindström & Åsa Ståhl, Jana Winderen),
as well as essay contributions by curators and philosophers.
Each book includes one of five produced CDs by the participating artists.
Following the publication of
Surface Tension: Problematics of Site in 2003,
Surface Tension appears regularly as a series of published
Supplements (launched 2006) that continues the artistic and philosophical program initiated in the original anthology. The series addresses questions of site-specific art, public and architectural space, and location-based practices, supporting investigations onto public practices through writing, documentation, and field work, while questioning what role such practices can offer in defining contemporary culture.
