BOTTLE VOX

2012

Performance with installation including multitrack audio, writing, Berlin, Germany, 2012

The first radio station in Berlin broadcast from voxstraße in 1928, employing a marble-carved microphone built by Eugene Reisz and George Neumann, who later developed the condenser microphone and bottle microphone. The conjunction of Germany's beer brewing and recycling efforts results, in certain neighborhoods, in the proliferation of empty bottles along sidewalks. The bottles are left to be collected, recycled and money gained, ostensibly by a person or persons who units of time/cost are measured by the distance between bottles, rather than the consumption of the volume within the bottle.

The stonework of the streets and sidewalks suggest a history of expanding, using and reusing, allocating and signaling the movement of people throughout the city. Cobblestones lie next to brick lanes bordered in cement; the asphalt outlined by a strip of stone that dams an area of square granite. A subtle effect is the sound a step might make or not make. It may inform the type of shoes one decides to wear, or the method of transportation and by extension quantification of distance. It may affect the drainage of rain in this often gray city, and the reception of green grass or gray sand. There is a primacy to this surface level in Berlin, as the limited building height and flatness of the terrain gives a sprawling characteristic that compounds a sense of spatial openness at a single location and an endless suburban expanse in non-locations

Audio recording of notes walking from site of exhibition to the Vox Straße, where the first German Radio was broadcast. The sound of bottles collected during the walk was captured via a Neumann microphone, the inventor of German audio microphones.

This work was made with support from Sound Development City; audio read by Maria Guggenbichler