POLYPHONIC MUSEUM

online

On 11 August, the digital Polyphonic.Museum will begin its exhibition presentation at the web address www.polyphonic.museum with sound sculptures by 23 artists from the Munich art and music scene.

The Polyphonic.Museum is a museum for sound sculptures in which the presentation of sound art is combined into a multi-voiced discourse between artists, curators and the public. With its ongoing archival work, the Polyphonic.Museum contributes to establishing the meaningful unity of visual art and music and to rethinking interference.

Sound sculptures often require special care and expand through ongoing additions. As a result, the expansive voices of each artwork are rarely exhibited, often in the hands of artists, and even less so when viewed together.

During several years of research, PLATFORM’s trainee Adam Langer came across a great variety of sound sculptures in Munich and from this developed the plan to make them accessible to a broad public. This was followed by individual projects such as the workshop series dadamachines: From Everyday Object to Musical Instrument in Beijing, Shenzhen and Hong Kong in cooperation with the Goethe Institute Beijing. With the founding of the Polyphonic.Museum as part of his cultural management traineeship at PLATFORM, Adam Langer is now creating a sustainable platform for the presentation of his documentation work, which he is continuing with his company Agency &.

The visual design of the Polyphonic.Museum was created by David Liebermann, part of the Hamburg design collective LiebermannKiepeReddemann, as a spatially plastic web archive. A central component of the website www.polyphonic.museum are three-dimensional scans of the artworks, which together with sound recordings, photographs and videos enable a cross-media view of the artworks. Descriptions of the works and interviews with the artists also provide personal insights into the creative processes. Links to the individual websites of the artists make the Polyphonic Museum a network of sound sculpture.

The name Polyphonic.Museum reflects the polyphony of the exhibited works and artists, but also serves as a web address. .museum is a generic top-level domain that has been used to represent museums on the Internet since 2001 (introduced by the ICOM – International Council of Museums). With its guiding principle of polyphony, the museum refers to the values of a new museum definition discussed by ICOM in Kyoto 2019.

As a resonance space for its digital collection, the Polyphonic.Museum shows complementary, analogue exhibitions at changing locations from time to time, creating a forum for personal exchange between artists, art and visitors.