OUTandDOORS

“Hello. Nice to meet you.” So begins the audio walk across Düsseldorf’s city centre. You follow a voice that seems more digital than analogue, and it knows more about your city than you do. Yet you need to feed it new data sets when it faces a conundrum: What, actually, is this “public space”? And who owns it? During a forty-minute walk that you are experiencing via headphones, you move through the city while listening to voices from around the globe; voices that simultaneously start their explorations with this dubious voice, in other places. Does one human being from Chongqing pose the same questions as another human being from Haifa? After a while, fiction and really start blurring, and you lose your sense of direction. Did you just hear a bike where there was none? Are you sinking deeper into the digital realm that links us all? And what are those looks you feel upon yourself when you walk along the street?

HELLA LUX compiled OUTandDOORS in collaboration with 12 young people from 8 different countries and now invites you to an aural experience that quite literally puts perspectives on public spaces from around the world in your ears.

OUTandDOORS is an international cultural project by HELLA LUX and the Farmont Stiftung. Participants from 8 of Düsseldorf’s twin cities – Haifa, Chiba, Chongqing, Moscow, Palermo, Reading, Warsaw, and Chemnitz – collaborated in digital seminars to create an audio walk that will premiere across all cities in 2022. The participants came together in virtual workshops over the course of two months, during which they learnt to devise an audio walk – from sound recording basics to insights into the Storydive app technology through to impulses for the development of a dramatic concept for auditive storytelling. Due to the different perspectives of the participants, a mosaic of sounds and an open, digital and artistic collaboration emerged that combines into one immersive audio experience.