Umbrae - an Ambisonic soundscape by DXARTS Alumna and Research Scientist Ewa Trębacz - was premiered on September 9, 2023 as part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.
The Medium Sonorum concert was the final event of their Sonic Saturday annual symposium, this year titled "Manufacturing Audible Truth" (in response to the festival's theme Who Owns the Truth?). The Symposium took place at the Sonic Lab of the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz.
The program included mulitchannel compositions by Jakob Gille (DE), Manu Meier (CH), Chin Ting Chan (HK), Ewa Trębacz (PL/US), Tolga Yayalar (TR), and Berk Yagli (CY) - all of them presented with the ABPU's 20.4 surround sound system.
The theme of Ars Electronica in 2023, this year for- mulated as a question, aims directly at key disputed topics of our time: truth and ownership, interpretive authority and sovereignty. Can truth be owned? Is there a right to truth and if it does belong to someone or some institution, what control and responsibility are associated with it?
How do we ask ourselves such questions in this age of global interconnectedness and the rapidly developing performance of so-called Artificial Intelligence? In an age, moreover, in which a small number of people, in neo-feudalistic fashion, have usurped the management of collective knowledge, and in which we also have good reason to doubt whether the vision of technology represents the solution to our problems.