This intervention works with the resonant properties of certain public spaces of ancient Messene through an in situ feedback apparatus. Reworking the process of Alvin Lucier’s seminal sound artwork I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), this piece plays back audio artefacts of public lectures given by the visionary architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis.

Echoing Hippodamus of Miletus’s programmatic « ideal city » on which Messene was modeled, Doxiadis work was an answer to the urban decay of the democratic modern city by imagining functional forms of human settlement that reflect « entopia » (in-place), a new way of building space that is nor dystopian or utopian. The audio artefacts used in Entopia were drawn from archival material related to research projects he conducted in the 1960s : Architectural Space in Ancient Greece and The City of the Future.

This work proposes a means of sensing the precarious nature of emancipatory urban planning by turning to a process that could be considered one of the origins of contemporary sound art.

This project was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.

Curatorial support: Eric Mattson

> see also related installation Act as fate wills, destruction comes

--> See here the documetaion.