Phantom
Power
with Andreas Zißler and Dominic Schwab#sonicspectres #mediaarcheaology #spatialsampling
In the workshop we approach the Otto-Wagner-Areal (OWA) in Vienna through sonic and visual media. Working with Ambisonics and multichannel audio, we will construct a collective and speculative portrait of the site - its architecture, myths, absences, and ghosts. The OWA, with its layered pasts, offers a terrain shaped by medical and architectural legacies, institutional infrastructures, and ideological frameworks—and not least, as a documented scene of crime tied to histories of violence and coercion.
We approach it not through direct documentation, but via abstraction, distortion, and reduction—methods of sonic and visual manipulation that might illuminate that which resists clarity: the ghosts, myths, murmurs, forgotten figures. This is not about revealing what was, but listening toward what might have been—or could still emerge. Guided by an idea of a speculative acoustic archaeology, we’ll gather and manipulate audio and video material—field recordings, found objects, oral fragments using techniques of reduction, abstraction, looping, and layering.
We approach sound as a relational force—transgressive, porous, and always in motion. The voice, a ‘bodily missile’ (LaBelle’s Lexicon of the Mouth) does not leave the body behind but “carries it forward,” displacing presence and drawing new lines of connection.
In the workshop we are in search of phantom forces - histories that haunt, structures and landscapes that remember, atmospheres that resist representation. Through collective experimentation, we will not reconstruct or redraw a site but listen back on it, allowing the phantoms to gain a new spatial presence.
Andreas Zißler is an artist and architect with a background in precision mechanics. He is currently based in Vienna, Austria. His works are site-specific and performative and in the last years, sound has become a central element in his artistic practice. He is interested in integrating his work into environmental processes, a challenging endeavor that requires letting go of expectations and control, and instead finding modes of negotiation within the environment he is working in, giving attention to both its physical and social constructions. Most of his efforts result in site-specific installations, sculptural works, as well as performances and concerts.
Although his work has taken him outside the boundaries of what is commonly called architecture, he sees himself deeply rooted in spatial thinking and working, developed through his architectural education and practice. An integral part of his work involves using digital planning and fabrication methods, navigating between analog and digital realms, making sense of misinterpretations within this translation process. Besides his own artistic practice he works as a lecturer at Art University Linz and at the Institute for Experimental Architecture, ./studio3 in Innsbruck.
www.andreaszissler.com
Dominic Schwab is an architect, teacher and researcher based in Vienna. Since 2020, he is a faculty member at the ./studio3, Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. He is currently pursuing a PhD with a research focus on the digital reconstruction of spatial narratives and the spectrality of media technologies. He has also taught at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and is a regular academic guest & critic at various institutions, such as the Chair for Digital Architectonics, ITA, ETH Zürich, the Institute for Architecture and Media, University of Graz and the Department for Architecture Theory and the Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology. In 2022 he co-founded PARABOL, an association that aims at advancing artistic research and SO@P, a media art collective that explores the architecture of virtual spaces and its social, political and cultural implications. Beyond that he is also Co-Founder and Co-Organizer of the Vienna Architecture Summer School. His work has been widely screened and exhibited, including MAK Center for Art and Architecture Los Angeles 2024, Goethe Institut Madrid 2023, MAGAZIN Vienna 2023, Ars Electronica Barcelona Garden 2021, AUT Innsbruck 2021, Greenwich Heritage Gallery London 2016, Wien Museum 2016, Rundgang Academy of Fine Arts Vienna 2016/17/18 amongst others.
www.dominicschwab.com
www.parabol.info www.someonlinearchitecturepractice.com
︎︎︎ MEDIA: ambisonics, multi channel audio, visual media
︎︎︎LOCATION: main location & larger area of OWA
︎︎︎TEACHING LANGUAGE: english (german if applicable)
︎︎︎WHAT TO BRING : laptop, headphones, camera/phone
︎︎︎REQUIREMENTS: interest in artistic research, no prior software knowledge required
︎︎︎MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 5