tuned city

A Day of Audio Streams and Soundwalks
02.05.26 / 4pm – 6pm & 7.30 – 10pm @ Liebig12, Berlin

On May 2nd Liebig 12 presents a day devoted to hearing and exploring our sound environment in very different ways. There will be a soundwalk around the streets, parks and pathways of Friedrichshain, followed by an evening of listening, discussion and talks devoted to the fast-growing practice of audio streaming. Artist and researchers Peter Cusack, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Michiel Huijsman, Udo Noll, Carsten Stabenow and others will outline projects in which they are involved, including radio.aporee, radio.earth, Soundtrackcity, Terra Ignota.
Continue Reading “The Familiar and the Remote”

The radio piece Navigating Radiales – A Sonic Journey Through Southernmost Chile had its broadcast premiere on August 29, 2025, on Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
The audio montage by Raviv Ganchrow and Carsten Stabenow consists of raw location recordings, with no added audio effects, tracing a research journey through Chile’s southernmost regions (Tierra del Fuego and Navarino Island) to the decommissioned radio station at Wulaia Bay.
Continue Reading “Navigating Radiales”

Whale Refractions is a research project currently underway at the Centre for Advanced Study inherit based at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Questions of addressing ‘heritage at large’ grew out of previous itterations of the Terra Ignota platform while observing oscillatory interrelations between humans and marine mammals and evolutions of cetacean underwater hearing in the historical and geological and climate contexts of the Magallanes Region.

Terra Ignota 2025
21.1. – 7.2.2025, Navarino Island, Patagonia, Chile

Radiales is the name of the new project by Terra Ignota, extending the geological research “Intercultural Contact Zone” conducted between 2017 and 2024 in Yendegaia National Park. This project continues the transdisciplinary study as a way to understand this territory and its different forms of interpretation.
The study area focuses on the geological continuity of Yendegaia Bay, specifically the Murray Channel. This maritime passage is located latitudinally between Hoste Island and Navarino Island, and longitudinally between the Beagle Channel and Nassau Bay at Cape Horn, at coordinates 55°00’00.0?S 68°19’49.7?W. As a base camp, we will use the former navy radio station located in Bahía Wulaia.

Terra Ignota Forum 2024
Facultades de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad de Magallanes, Punta Arenas, Chile

After collaborations with institutions such as the Ethnological Museum Vienna (Weltmuseum Wien) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santiago (MAC), the first TIF field lab and forum in Yendegaia National Park in March 2023, the geographical mirrored experience with the field lab in Northern Germany (Rügen, September 2023) and the knowledge transfer and training programme at La Leñera Cultural Centre in Valdivia (December 2023), the different lines of activities – which include fieldwork, research, artistic production, mediation and education – now converge in the Terra Ignota Forum hosted by the Universidad de Magallanes in Punta Arenas.

Continue Reading “Contact Zones”

SONIC ISLANDS – Mirrored perceptions between Tierra del Fuego + Rügen
March and September 2023

SONIC ISLANDS focuses on the various auditory aspects of the TERRA IGNOTA project and is part of TIF 2023/24. We are interested in the meaning of sound as a semantic system and as a form of artistic articulation. Questions about origin, identity, intercultural understanding but also about perception, legibility and interaction with the environment, social processes and structures beyond visually connoted reference systems are the subject of our joint research. Listening and making audible to stimulate changes of perspective in the process of artistic research and knowledge production as well as in communicating to an audience.

Continue Reading “SONIC ISLANDS”

edited by Carsten Seiffarth and Carsten Stabenow
out at norient books!

On the occasion of the Beethoven Anniversary Year and the conclusion of “bonn hoeren”, the international exchange project “sonotopia –
the sonic explorers”, commissioned by the Beethoven Foundation Bonn, sent six young European sound artists on artistic expeditions to four cities on four continents. After one-month residencies in Tehran, Dakar and Valparaíso?/?Bonn, each coupling two of the young European sound artists with two local ones, all twelve of them came together for a joint residency and final exhibition in Bonn at the end of the project.

https://norient.com/books/sonotopia

“Why can’t sounds be visible?
Would the feedback from ear to eye cause fatal oscillation?”
(Pauline Oliveros)

What is sound? What is this phenomenon that we can neither see nor touch, but can touch us?
The Belgian artist Els Viaene has been working for over 15 years with the medium of sound in large scale installations and compositions – the sound experience was always the end product. According to her perception, however, apparatuses, objects and technologies have always stood in the foreground – between her and the sound.
In Ways of seeing sound, she investigated sound at it’s source, approaching it as a physical phenomenon in the moment it is shaped: as vibration, wave, change in air pressure. She analyzed the opto-acoustic experiments collected by John Tyndall around 1876* and reconstructed in collaboration with the Ghent University Museum (GUM) many of the historical setups. Based on that, she developed a series of new experiments and methods to make sound visible and takes us on a journey of perception.
The exhibition for Liebig 12 is a Wunderkammer in which science and sound collide and the concepts of seeing and hearing blur.

Continue Reading “Els Viaene – Ways of Seeing Sound”

Terra Ignota was invited to participate in residence at Weltmuseum within the framework of the TAKING CARE project, a research carried out between September 20 and November 10. October 2023 Planning to show their results in the “Extinction!?” exhibition that will take place in the Weltmuseum between February 2023 and January 2024. Fernanda Olivares, from the Selk’nam Covadonga Ona Community in Chile, and Nicolás Spencer, artist, participated in the program in collaboration with Claudia Augustat, curator of the South American collection at the Weltmuseum.

Continue Reading “TERRA IGNOTA at Weltmuseum within the framework of the TAKING CARE project”

In the old secondary ports of Montevideo and Rostock, a paradigmatic characteristic manifests itself: the morphologies of these beautiful centuries-old cities with discreet, elegant architecture and steeped in history; new global ports are assembled on their edges in the Warnow and De La Plata rivers, mechanical monsters standardized by world freight traffic come in scene. This radical encounter between the global and the local appears materialized as a collision. Territorial issue that gives physical clues to the contradictions we inhabit as a new post-industrial and hyper-mercantile era. In 2021 we will place ourselves – understanding post-pandemic care as the new skin of the body – on the uncertain edges.

Continue Reading “Expeditions in Specific Territory Rostock-Montevideo”

The project was part of Radio Total. Festival of Visual Arts On Air, 4 – 12 September, 2021 in Gdansk, Poland and on air at 91,3 UKF.

The project CAUS is focused on the analysis of urban sound, regarding the information it contains about the city’s identity in past, present and future as well as in the social, environmental and global context. The analysis is carried out by a group of experts who will conduct investigations, theoretical and practical research and experiments.

Artists: Marcin Dymiter PL, Lukasz Pancewicz PL, Julie Myers UK/DE, Carsten Stabenow DE, Krzysztof Topolski PL, Franziska Windisch DE/BE
Curator: Florian Tuercke DE/PL

Some of the observations are documented here >>>

We are pleased to invite you to the opening of Sonic Aggregator, a collaborative project of Soundtrackcity and Tuned City about sonic placemaking hosted by ABA Air Berlin Alexanderplatz at Haus der Statistik in Berlin – Friday, September 17 – 7pm.
Sonic Aggregator has been long in the making and postponed several times due to covid measures, but finally this project is about to happen! We look forward to meet you at the official opening on 17 September or during one of the events in the week thereafter.  Have a look at the programme and make reservations!

Continue Reading “sonic aggregator + sonic placemaking”

Almost 100 years ago the artist and explorer Rockwell Kent crossed the Baldivia Chain between Seno Almirantazgo and the Beagle Channel via the Lapataia Valley. His documentation* of the landscape and climate is one of the first descriptions of this passage and serves as an important historic reference. Especially interesting in our context is his perspective as an artist becoming an explorer – sensing, registering, translating and documenting in an unconventional way.

Continue Reading “Terra Ignota – Research Trip III”