Hearing is the work

Professor Peter Ablinger’s work with noise – or, specifically, ‘Rauschen’, in German – is multifaceted, but it is driven largely by an awareness of both the surplus of data in noise (its multiplicities, its ambiguous lack of hierarchies) and by the concomitant, active engagement with this sonic data by the listener through the construction of patterns, melodic figures, implied movements, and sonic figures ‘inside’ of the unstable static of the noise.

His work frequently holds the mirror up to the listener and the conventions of listening practice. This has been intensified in his recent Landscape Opera and CityOpera, modular works of the last decade, that combine various art forms (literature, concerts, installation, film, performance, architecture, land art, etc.) in such a way that the place (the city, the landscape) becomes the subject of the opera. He seeks to make work that generates direct awareness of sound, of heightened states of listening, of the gap between actual, experiential sound and internal, perceived sound.