End of September is the time of the entrance exams for those who want to study in the field of art, in spite of Beuys. Trying to pass that exam for the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, I wanted to know what my co-applicants were thinking about being obliged to go throught that kind of examining procedure.

The result is a sound installation, realized on Sept. 29 and 30 in the entrance hall of the building where the exams took place (Semper-Depot, Vienna, Leharg. 6). It's a montage of statements made by applicants as well as by members of the Academy (some professors and assistants, the vice-rector), recorded during short interviews (5 to 8 min.) that I made during the first to days of the exams. The questions I put where roughly of the following type:

• do you think entrance exams for artistic studies are necessary and that they make sense?
• what do you think of the way Joseph Beuys' acted when he was a professor at the Academy of Düsseldorf, taking all students that were applying and finally occupying the office of the Academy together with those students who were not taken (would you take everyone if you were a professor)
• do you have some feeling of competition or pressure in connection with the exams, and do you think that competition is an important thing in comtemporary art.

The installation is locally and temporally bound to the "happening" of the exams itself - it is a kind of installed real-time reflection. The Rector of the Academy allowed that both the entrance area of the "Semper-Depot" and the entrance hall of the Academy building on Schillerplatz can be used for a parallel installation, but with respect to the latter location, it turned out to be impossible because of lack of equipment.

The sound-file prepared for the installation can be downloaded here. It can freely be reused by everyone, provided that the address of the original download-link (this page) will be mentioned. Finally, I would like to mention that the whole thing was realized using exclusively free and open-sourced software (actually, I worked on Gentoo-Linux, using audacity for cutting and editing). And many thanks to the people who gave me an interview, of course.

Please feel free to comment both the project and the questions themselves, as well as the answers and statements given on the sound file.

download links:

acoustic reflections.mp3
acoustic reflections.ogg

(Download only one of the two! mp3 is heavily licenced, if you want to use that, ok. ogg is an open-source format, you can play it on Freeamp, xmms, noatun, and other open source players...)