The Sound of the Multitude

The pedestrian underpass at the Konrad Adenauer Bridge in Mülheim is not an inviting place, despite a view of the river slowly streaming past. Rather, the concrete pillars, graffiti, and low passageway give rise to an urban ‘non-place’ where walkers strolling along the idyllic path next to the Ruhr River suddenly find themselves confronted with traces of an efficient metropolitan traffic system. It is precisely here that Nik Nowak has transformed an overseas shipping container into a seemingly monolithic, movable sound sculpture of industrial dimensions. As a participatory installation, it creates a site for discourse and for musical, acoustic intervention. The daily programme also contains suggestions and compositions uploaded on the associated website and uses the Multitude as an amplifier and instrument whose extraordinary sound experience affects the whole body.

This project is both an appeal to society and a megaphone amplifying different voices and sounds in this context, a society shaped by migration routes over multiple generations and by phases of industrial and post-industrial development. Taking as a point of departure the question of who we are as a society, the Berlin-based artist Nik Nowak (b. 1981 in Mainz) confronts virtuality with materiality, while thematising the relationship between private life and the public sphere in the digital age. His multimedia work is focused on the affective dimensions and potentials of sound and space that redefine the formal boundaries between installation and sculpture. For Nowak, sound is both a source of identity and an element influencing society. Here, he is particularly interested in the implementation of mobile sound systems as cultural transmitters and as a global and trans-temporal phenomena, and in contrast, their use as acoustic weapons in warfare.

The project The Sound of the Multitude is supported by the Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung.