You Never Know

IMA Soundgalerie, Klosterhof Hainburg
15 09 2012 - 17 01 2013 IMA Soundgalerie | Intime Räume , Hainburg
10 10 2013 - 27 10 2013 ANX | Haptosonics, Oslo
17 09 2015 - 15 12 2015 Kaunas Biennial | Kaunas
17 11 2016 - 31 01 2017 Klangraum Fröbelgasse, Vienna
12 01 2018 - 29 01 2018 Medienwerkstatt Wien
25 07 2019 - 25 08 2019 ARTJOG MMXIX, Yogyakarta
07 11 2020 - 08 11 2020 Wien Modern, Vienna shifted
13 11 2021 - 14 11 2021 Wien Modern, Vienna
The sculpture is a tactile, intimate sound space designed to accommodate one person. It invites the visitor to enter and touch it. It reacts.

Intimate spaces are in constant motion, are ambivalent. They can occur anywhere and are not clearly perceptible. They are characterized by utopias of intimacy, permanence, and the fulfilment of our yearnings. At the same time they are places of vulnerability and fragility. Intimacy is something wild that expresses itself in innumerable and unforseeable forms. It aspires to create stories about itself and others and needs only very few signs and gestures to communicate. It generates an aesthetics of attachments.

The intimacy of artistic expressions creates experienceable spaces: fragile, vulnerable, unforeseeable.

The idea behind You Never Know and its form come from thinking about movement. All parts are flexible: the semi-stable metal frame, the moving textile skin that applies shape memory alloy technology (muscle wire), or the sound flowing over the object. Touch sensors allow the visitors to interact with the objects.

Intimate spaces are flexible spaces, unforeseeable. So, you never know...

Conception: Hillevi Munthe & Elisabeth Schimana
Textile skin, muscle wire, sensors: Hillevi Munthe
Sound and interaction: Elisabeth Schimana
Metal work: Eskil Tin
Technical supervision: Norbert Math, Günther Schiebeck, Peter Donhauser, Hans Wilmers

During a four-day artistic retreat in December 2017 Elisabeth Schimana and Hillevi Munthe have collaborated with with Claudia Röck, a conservator who specializes in software-based art, to develop a form of notation for the interactive sculpture You Never Know. Hard- and software have been examined closely and processes analyzed and transferred into a metalanguage intended to continue to endure 1000 years from now.

Supported by: niederösterreich kultur, bundeskanzleramt : kunst, Austrian Embassy Oslo, Austrian Embassy Vilnius, Arts Council Norway, NOTAM (Norsk Senter for Teknologii Musikk og Kunst), PNEK (Production Network for Electronic Art, Norway), Austrian Embassy Jakarta