ACUO - Aboard

Passersby can enter the foil-covered stellar shape and experience the outside world in a new way. People have a lot of sounds around them, know all the sounds and remember them but don’t pay attention. This installation, with six microphones and one sound periscope, is telling people: Come in and listen to all the sounds the city makes. Michal Šeba

Acuo is an inter­ac­tive audio-visual instal­la­tion for pub­lic spaces. It is based on the con­cept by Michal Šeba, with the sup­port of munic­i­pal projects BU2R. With its shape and func­tions, Acuo resem­bles a cos­mic mod­ule which has landed in the city to observe the affairs around. Acuo sees and hears in a way dif­fer­ent from ours.

It scans the world with six micro­phones and three cam­eras; then it trans­mits the envi­ron­ment thus cap­tured to the inside, to emit a spa­tial audio expe­ri­ence and to screen it through a LED sys­tem onto all of its inner walls. At the same time, Acuo trans­mits the sound around it through a ter­res­trial FM radio sig­nal and streams both audio and video online to its acuo.cz base. There, this record­ing is archived for future gen­er­a­tions. In addi­tion, the mod­ule is equipped with a “periscope” with a highly sen­si­tive direc­tional micro­phone; this enables the audi­ence to cap­ture audio details of the city com­mo­tion.

The crew is made of the passers-by; inside the Acuo mod­ule, they can expe­ri­ence the city in another way, they can ana­lyze the events out­side while con­tem­plat­ing the end­less vari­abil­ity of indi­vid­ual out­put mod­i­fi­ca­tion. From a brand new per­spec­tive, the vis­i­tors can expe­ri­ence the sound map of a place they walk through every day, with­out the abil­ity to thor­oughly per­ceive or listen.

Cred­its:
Con­cept and photographs: Michal Šeba
Project archi­tect: Vitezslav Danda, www.editarchitects.com
Coop­er­a­tion: Ivan Boros, Matous Godik, Pedro Sousa San­tos, [Edit!]
LED sys­tem: Michal Pustejovsky
Audio sys­tem: Stanislav Abra­ham, Michal Seba, [Data-live]
Con­struc­tion: Libor Stych, Mirek Mares
Facade: Alice Klouzkova, Jana Jetelova, [Sistersconspiracy]
Web­de­sign, stream: Matej Bacov­sky [Bioport]
Pro­duc­tion: Petr Hoz­man [Shot Rab­bit], Jakub Stran­sky [Yinachi/BU2R]
Location: Prague, Czech Republic
Project Year: 2011