Hybrid Space @ Talking Cities

Exhibition & Publication Talking Cities Radio @ Talking Cities, Essen, Germany, 16 May 2006

The interactive Audio Lounge provides the framework for Talking Cities Radio, designed exclusively for Talking Cities. The Lounge will be realised in cooperation with students from the “Hybrid Space” project group of Prof. Frans Vogelaar, Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. Just as our cities are crossed by infrastructure, transportation and utility networks, the four sculpted audio seating areas are traversed by broad bands, each carrying the audio signal of one of the four radio stations. By means of little cable spools in which loudspeakers are integrated, visitors can go to any point along a band and listen to the programme of that particular radio station in German, or in English.

Prof. Frans Vogelaar, „Hybrid Space”, Academy of Media Arts Cologne
Project management: Christoph Haag and Ina Krebs
Project support team: Andreas Muxel, Isabelle Niehsen, Therese Schuleit, Heiner Schilling, Michael Pichler, Mohamed Fezazi, Thomas Kulessa, Karin Lignau
Technical support: Martin Nawrath, Heinz Nink, Martin Rumori, Falco Sixel, Bernd Voss

The exhibition will feature its own radio station: Talking Cities Radio (TCR), Talking Cities conceived in cooperation with the architecture journalist Dirk Meyhöfer. Talking Cities Radio is a dialogue about our cities, made audible to the listener in the form of a concentrated collage of statements by the exhibition’s protagonists – this makes the radio station one of the main points of access to the topics addressed in the exhibition: heterogeneous, multi-disciplinary and micropolitical. In the “Talking Cities Audio Lounge” visitors to the exhibition can choose from four channels with different profiles:

TCR 1 is “Ruhrpott radio” – the authentic sound of the industrial Ruhr area. The composer Matthias Kaul will be developing an exclusive sound composition, closely linked to the local Zollverein coal mine and the coal washery.

TCR 2 is the urban music channel. Visitors can hear pieces of music related to the exhibition’s themes, selected by the architects, designers and artists of Talking Cities.

TCR 3 delivers the cultural programme, it provides a four-part feature on the future of the city: ravaged, fragmented, a failure – and in spite of that we find a way out of the dilemma!

TCR 4 summarises all the important information, like an urban magazine programme, with statements, news and

Dirk Meyhöfer; freelance architecture journalist, Hamburg
Editorial and production assistance: Betsy Greiner
Composer: Matthias Kaul

Talking Cities, curated by Francesca Ferguson and Urban Drift Productions Ltd., features innovative international design, architecture and spatial interventions in a trans-disciplinary exhibition platform. The 35 protagonists create a dense collage of statements, designs and installations: a collective dialogue on reconfiguring and reactivating the marginal, residual and public spaces of our contemporary cities.

Talking Cities is conceived as a trans-disciplinary exhibition for the spectacular coal washing plant at Zeche Zollverein, a world heritage site within Germany’s industrial heartland – the Ruhr Area. As part of the international architecture and design forum ENTRY2006, the exhibition draws inspiration from the transformational nature of the site itself, and from the contemporary urbanized landscape that surrounds it.