_{The Five Elements of Berlin Biophony}

Berliner Biophonie der fünf Elemente

Exhibition, sound installation, interventions and acoustic research stations, concert and sound performance

The Ernst Reuter Platz in Berlin, a busy traffic roundabout around an oval lawn with sculptures as well as two basins with fountains.without (left) and with the bauhaus reuse pavillion. [google maps]

_{water wind glas metal earth}

The decades-long search for sustainability, for conscious use of resources, for intelligent re-naturalisation of urban use and traffic areas at a traffic junction in Charlottenburg, which already began with the West Berlin history of the site, has produced its own "biotope" with the bauhaus reuse and the paradoxical idyll in the middle of Ernst-Reuter-Platz.

The project "Five Elements of Berlin Biophony / Berliner Biophonie der fünf Elemente" takes the organic biosphere of the site seriously: the five elements water, earth, air, glass (emblematic of architecture and building) and metal (emblematic of traffic) are investigated with sonic means and measuring instruments, and the bauhaus reuse transforms itself in its architectural setting into a sounding measuring instrument of the sonic landscape.

The biophony of the air is measured with sound kites - kites ascending on sounding strings that explore the airspace by analogue and electronic means - of the earth with geophones in the ground, of the water with hydrophones in the fountains. The outside and inside of the bauhaus reuse are placed in a musical relationship: The cycle of city traffic is counterpointed with strings resonating in electronic loops. All the sounding elements flow into the sound installation inside the bauhaus reuse and radiate outwards.

What ideas of man-made nature come together here in a strange mimicry of ancient world concepts? The project "Five Elements of Berlin Biophony / Berliner Biophonie der fünf Elemente" opens up sonic perspectives and spaces of experience on these ideas and relates them to the current questions of resource use and sustainability in times of critical change in the fundamental cycles of our planetary biosphere.
Lectures on the five elements by civil society actors and scientists lead into artistic tours of acoustic research stations. Here, the audience can experience by listening the local quasi-ethnological observations of nature, with contemporary music and sound art, und sonic measuring devices (special microphones) as filters and transforming sound prisms.

A concert on Saturday evening will integrate all the observations and collected sound research objects, and diverse interventions will make the bio-, anthropo- and technophonic depth of Ernst-Reuter-Platz and the surrounding circular flows and buildings resound - and the wall of noise of the fountains will be transformed into nocturnal silences.