OZ

Acoustical Portrait of the Land of Oz

Installation & Radiowork by
Isabella Bordoni Roberto Paci Dalò

SFB Sender Freies Berlin, Lichthof
March 7 1996

OZ is an installation and radiopiece which focus on the concept of imaginary city.
It's a sort of utopia of city which is made out of soundlandscapes coming from different
places and also directly from the fantasy of the authors. After the creation of pieces like:
NAPOLI (1993) and MANY MANY VOICES (1995) now there's a further step into an imaginary place.
True that any acoustical portrait of a city is a personal point of view about the city itself
and probably this point of view doesn't really correspond to a more general idea about the subject.
The listener who approach NAPOLI for instance doesn't probably find the acoustical clichees of a
such special city. In MANY MANY VOICES the quantity of German words we can hear (in a piece which is a portrait of
Berlin) is extremely reduced, privileging the "other" languages and giving once more a different
approach to acoustical routine.

In OZ, from one side the composition is rather abstract and on the other hand the piece has a solid
"narrative" background coming from a book which is already written (but no part of its text is used
for the piece). Why a fairy tale? In a fairy tale there's normally a concentration of elements which are common
throughout all the cultures. It's interesting to have a common platform understood by everybody - including kids -. Something which
can be told in few sentences becaming a natural door of perception.

This multi channel computer controlled sound installation present materials which include urban and rural
sounds, voices, synthetic sounds. Part of the treatment of the sound is done through interactive computer
systems such as the SensorLab Ð Real World to Midi Interface Ð created at STEIM Foundation (Amsterdam).

The performance at the opening on March 7th 1996 includes sounds from the installation together with the
same acoustical materials performed live through sampler and interactive systems.

OZ is part of a process focused around the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which will bring throughout
the 1996 to produce several works which will happen simultaneously on stage and on-line on the Internet.

-- Roberto Paci Dalò & Isabella Bordoni

OZ was produced during February 1996 at Giardini Pensili MediaLab.
OZ is a production Akademie der Künste, Sender Freies Berlin, Giardini Pensili.