Circulating Copies is a biennial exhibition project of the IMAI - Inter Media Art Institute taking place on screens and sound systems across the city of 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, and speaker systems – are not neutral containers of information or entertainment. They carry assumptions about how the majority of people see and hear, and how attention “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.

Circulating Copies comprises newly commissioned artistic productions in urban space, as well as 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.