Krakow to Venice in 12 hours

Whilst the control of noise pollution is a common concern for today’s architects
and urban planners, it is true that the component sounds of a city are an integral part of its identity.
The specific acoustics of buildings and the spaces around them offer points of orientation on any urban journey.  

Kraków to Venice in 12 hours maps a journey across Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia to Italy, visiting Krakow, Katowice, Bielsko-Biala, Ostrava, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Graz, Maribor, Ljubljana, Trieste and Venice. 

The project attempts to capture the unique sonic identities of the 12 cities travelled through, searching for similarities and differences.  It acts as a personal and subjective audio travel guide and a clock for the journey, mapping the movement through geographical locations over the passage of time. 

12 min extract krakowtovenicein12h.com

The artist captures the city with binaural microphones; two microphones are worn in her ears as she moves through the city giving a personal time space perspective of the city soundscape. The unobtrusive microphones also bring the artist passing snippets of unguarded conversations interwoven with the unique sonic footprint of the city.

The language recorded on the streets, stations, town squares and cafes is an important element of the piece; marking the transition from one country to another, it serves as a spatial and temporal reference for the traveler in a borderless Schengen Europe. The structure of a 12-hour clock forms the basis of the immersive multichannel sound installation. In this 12 hour-long composition, the times of the recordings are synchronous with the real time of the installation’s location.

The structure of a 12-hour clock forms the basis of the immersive multichannel sound installation.  In this 12 hour-long composition, the times of the recordings are synchronous with the real time of the installation’s location.

50.06465,19.94498 to 45.441058,12.320845 (6 screenprints on rives paper 75 cm x 112 cm each) is a visual record of the artist’s movement through 12 urban locations where the field recordings took place for the Kraków to Venice in 12 hours project. 

The artist as an outsider is looking for key points within the urban space, but the city imposes its structure and creates a unique pattern for each of the drawings denoting the walks. The coloured dots on the map point to locations where the recordings took place on the hour. The printed record of latitude and longitude allows the viewer to discover exact locations where audio material was recorded.

The project exists on line as an interactive platform, where the listener can move through geographical locations and time listening to the field recordings and compositions on chosen parts of the journey.  www.krakowtovenicein12h.com

Exhibited