The ECHO Symposium at Designforum Steiermark

From Wednesday 30.01 to Saturday 01.02, the ESC became the exhibition space for the students of the Communication, Sound-, Media– and Interactiondesign courses of the 2018 academic year, exhibiting works that the students have conceptualized and realized during the semester.

The topic of echo is interpreted in individual ways by the students of the different courses. Echo is not only treated as an acoustic phenomenon, but can also be seen as the resonance that art evokes in the viewer.

The exhibition was accompanied by a symposium with international speakers from different disciplines at the Designforum Steiermark on Thursday 30.01 and Friday 31.01.

Christian Fleck, from the Institute of Sociology of the Karl Franzens University Graz, started day one of the symposium. In his lecture he made a historical excursion into the development of private and public space. Finally, the question of how historically formed rules of living together, can be applied to virtual spaces.

The Swiss author and architectural theorist Vera Bühlmann is co-founder of the Laboratory for Applied Virtuality at ETH Zurich. She has also been Professor of Architectural Theory at the Vienna University of Technology since 2016. Her work and her lecture at the “ECHO” symposium will focus on spaces and their relation to virtuality.

The second day of the symposium focused on image and sound with the 3-D artist László Bordos and the founder of the “radio aporee” project Udo Noll.

László Bordos has been working in the field of projection mapping for many years. He takes an excursion into the history of the projection of images. He also shows his impressive showreel of international works created in recent years.

Afterwards Udo Noll will talk about his project “radio aporee“. On the basis of the maps that Google provides in the form of Google Maps, Udo Noll and anyone who wants to support him will create maps of soundscapes. Different places can be linked to the respective soundscapes. In this way, “radio aporee” makes it possible to take walks through the sound backdrops in different districts and landscapes, completely independent of time or place.

On both days there were additional presentations of the students. Among other things, they talk about the basic design concept behind the exhibition “ECHO. They also discuss individual exhibits that were shown in the exhibition “ECHO” and describe their creation.