Artist and musicologist Werner Jauk presents the installation “PARA SONIC 3.0”, which makes the perceptual facets of listening experienceable on multiple sensory levels.

This installation by Werner Jauk (born 1953, lives in Graz) is based on a concept that explores sound–body interaction and is translated into a different sensory experience. The audience is encouraged to move collectively to intensive sounds and bodily stimulation, while the dancing motion of the audience in turn engenders sounds, light, smells, and targeted airflow. In realising this concept, tracking systems were developed to “recognise” emotional physical activity, but the piece also features an acousmonium, light devices, and selectively controllable ventilation systems. The objective is to foster multisensory stimulation on the part of the participants, who are to provide the audience with a new and unfamiliar experience.
Technical mediatisation has overstepped the measure of the human body in a “racing standstill” (Paul Virilio) of virtuality. Interactions with this environment take place in a state of “all-at-onceness” (Marshall McLuhan)—of a perceptual take on listening. PARA SONIC 3.0 thematically explores the energised act of listening to movement, which has a performative effect in social situations, and transfers this embodiment to seeing, smelling, and sensing as intermediatic transposition.
Here, informal interaction/dancing—collective and collectivising—serves as a paradigm for experiencing an inevitably hedonistic, bodily life-form in a new digitalised culture.

Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Werner Jauk is the director of the social and cultural studies workspace Pop/Music + Media/Art in the Institute of Musicology at Karl Franzens University in Graz. In 1986 he founded “grelle musik”, an experiment involving science and art, and in 1997 he established “pop-cult”, an interdisciplinary working group. Jauk has also realised projects that are positioned between science and art within the realm of media art.