Circulating Copies is a biennial exhibition project of the IMAI - Inter Media Art Institute taking place on screens and sound systems across urban spaces in Düsseldorf. Audiovisual media interfaces are a ubiquitous part of everyday life here, but they are rarely perceived as structures that can be played with or changed. This second edition of the project is dedicated to how these infrastructures organize, negotiate, and reflect how we see and hear in public spaces.
Public audiovisual infrastructure – screens, LED walls, public address systems, speakers – are not neutral containers of information or entertainment. They carry assumptions about how the majority of people see and hear, and how perception “functions”. These assumptions produce exclusions: they privilege specific bodies, senses, and modes of experience, while rendering others invisible or inaudible. Circulating Copies takes this as a starting-point to ask how artistic interventions can make such conditions visible, audible, and changeable. Seeing and hearing are here understood not as universal abilities, but rather as different, situated, and relational experiences that emerge within specific technical and social environments.
Three new artworks have been realized in the frame of Circulating Copies. The sound artist KMRU investigates the auditory orders in urban space in a new work commissioned together with the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The video artist Seo Hye Lee, selected in the frame of an open call, developed her contribution in collaboration with d/Deaf perspectives from Düsseldorf and other cities. In her work, public screens become sites of collective authorship, destabilizing dominant, normative modes of hearing. Düsseldorf Art Academy graduate Yoora Park provides a local perspective. Putting the platform screens of various Düsseldorf train stations to use, she investigates perception on the level of subtle vibrations and preconscious processes. Expanding on this, the class of Danica Dakić at the Düsseldorf Art Academy has developed new works for the city's audiovisual infrastructure.
Alongside the works in urban space, Circulating Copies includes an accompanying program developed in close exchange with artists, theorists, translators, and activists oriented towards non-visual and non-oral modes of communication, deliberately challenging normative modes of accessing audiovisual art.
