Studio Hani_Rashid’s curatorial contribution for the Angewandte Festival celebrates human interconnectivity and communication through the interplay between virtual collaboration environments and in situ installations, showcasing the diversity of the institute’s annual student works. Sonic Blur consists of a continuous striated landscape that seamlessly spans from a virtual exhibition platform easily accessible from any web browser, where visitors can communicate and interact while meandering among the works on display, to its physical counterpart in the main exhibition space at the Institute of Architecture. The exhibition design is characterised by a dense structural network that continuously morphs in proportion and density to ultimately reveal a variety of cultural venues at its core. The virtual show, developed by the studio’s students Sarah Agill and Raffael Stegfellner, forms a cluster of immersive structured landscapes. As the participants move through the digital halls, the overlapping of different traces intuitively leads them further into the mist of space. The tubular aggregation offers cues of the familiar but fuses them with plays on scale and weightlessness. Along the pathways, a carefully curated sonic trail accompanies the viewer through space, framing a synaesthetic composition where sound becomes palpable while the visual stays shifting as part of a continuously synchronised choreography. The distribution of the sonic and visual queues highlight ambiguous hints of action in the distance. As the virtual experience becomes an exploration of sensory stimulation in the sphere of complete immateriality, the physical exhibition at the institute hosts the physical models and works of the departments and broadcasts the virtual show on screens, offering a seamless experience between the digital and the physical environment.

Song “Loleta” by WMD (Michael Erickson)