For "Landscape Soundings" Bill Fontana asked the technicians of the ORF (Austrian Radio) to install an audio surveillance system with 16 microphones in the Stopfenreuther Au: the subjects of the surveillance being birds, frogs, water, airplanes, church bells and people casually passing by. The surveillance system registered all the acoustic signals and data within its range around the clock for 14 days. The microphones were connected to 16 telephone lines provided by the OPT (Austrian Post and Telecomm). The phone lines led to a 16 channel microwave transmitter installed by the ORF which sent the signals to the microwave antenna on the Kahlenberg and re-transmitted to the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The microwave transmission was actually two video channels which were divided into smaller units to provide the 16 audio channels. The signals were then decoded into sound-frequencies before being sent to the 70 loudspeakers located on the Maria-Theresien-Platz and on the facades of the Museums.

Fontana carefully planned both the installation of the microphones in the Au and that of the speakers in the cupolas of the museums and in the square, and aligned them so that space could be delineated with the help of sound. In the Au, these drawings - in the sense of an objet trouve - emerge as a matter of course: woodpeckers in the background, a wild boar coming closer, insects buzzing around a microphone, an airplane passing over high in the sky, and above all, the far-carrying bird calls passing rapidly from one microphone to another as they rippled out over the Au. In the Maria Theresien-Platz on the other hand, the disembodied, transmitted sounds were made to arrange themselves to create a resonating space, a sculptural space, and the sculpture thus created, while being made of many different spaces was, most of all, the space between the Maria-Theresien-Platz and the Stopfenreuther Au - the space of simultaneity.

Bill Fontana used the psychological situation of the live radio experience of being in two places at the same time: on a rainy morning the real-time sounds of rain falling in the Au and the reacton of the Au animals to the rain resounded from the loud-speakers in the Maria-Theresien Platz. It was by means of the experience of this simultaneity that the space between the Au and the Maria-Theresien-Platz could first be perceived as the difference between the two locatons (the site of the origin of the sounds and the site of their reception).

In Bill Fontana's, "Landscape Soundings" the space of the real-time, analog radio broadcast and the electronic space of digital communications technology overlap, defining two completely different views of the world - and the sculpture was layered in a similar way. In the foreground was the plane of narration, a linear, acoustic live story which, following the course of day and night, unfolded itself in time. In the background, behind this linear narrative (a relic of industrial culture ?) a door opened as in a surrealist painting (or nightmare), a door to the electronic space of simultaneity which threatened to undermine, even to replace, the linear certainties of the industrial age. This space is about the simultaneous, instantaneous and potentially universal availability and recallability of data which is available and recallable in the instant of storage; and which produces an equivalence between users (of electronic data systems) no matter how far apart their terminals are located from each other. Digital data are even further disembodied, relative to analog data transmission technology, because they are stripped of their identification with any specific perceptual sense organ and can be just as easily recalled (see "video microwave transmission" above) as sounds or as diagrams: that is, in whatever forms the technology can provide for our senses to perceive. (ln this sense there is no original source of data - all data locations have the same value.)

Thus "Landscape Soundings" did not create an illusory space or image "Au" on the Maria Theresien-Platz, nor did it create an image which would be produced "better" or "more beautifully" with the help of recorded (i.e., predictable in sequence and mixture) sounds. Rather, it concerned the image of a world in which information is constantly being shifted, recalled from one context to another: it dealt with the concept of a simultaneity in many locations, which has superceded the concept of time as sequence. It concerned the image of a world of remote control, whose present is composed more and more of recorded information recalled from the distance, monitored in the distance, becoming a new space of simultaneity (and no longer composed of that which takes place in succession at the individual's respective locations as narration in time).

On at least two days, a stereo line set up for the project was activated from the sound mixer in the Kunsthistorisches Museum connected to the broadcasting center: time and again, "Landscape Soundings" became a live radio sculpture in the course of a normal broadcasting day of ORF radio. Bill Fontana mixed the sixteen signals from the Au with recordings of their echoes on the Maria-Theresien-Platz and other live parameters. His mixture was broadcast live to all Ö1 radio listeners: each listener received his or her own sound sculpture according to the (acoustic) context in which he or she is listening. Contrary to the norm, radio was not viewed by Bill Fontana as the source of information, entertainment, or culture but rather the place of occurrence (living room, kitchen, car, walkman) in which the sounds (mixed by him) arrive - and where they are mixed with the existant acoustic environment, creating a new sculpture. The completion of this sculpture however requires the recipient's active participation in Duchamp's sense of the term. Yet the analogous past and the digital present and future once again overlap: one's attention is directed towards a device broadcasting data and located in a space which we perceive as a personal living room, work room, transportation room, or simply as a listening room. This intimate niche of personal freedom reveals itself as an anachronism, for devices which receive digital sound can very easily broadcast information back out again, even when it is (provisionally) just to provide reception research with data on the frequency of use concerning specific programs. The car - and even man himself - have long since become information carriers because spatial position, personal history, bank statements, state of health etc. have all become recallable data (the Graz artist, Richard Kriesche, calls man in electronic space, "radio man ").

The monitor and surveillance situation in the Au, which among other things can also be read as an image of monitored fields, monitored weather, monitored living creatures in research groups of all kinds, comes full circle to the urban society structured by electronic technology: we see a unified world in which differences between technology and nature (to which man also belongs) or even between art and nature are dissolved in the artificiality of data.

When one defines radio art as an art which makes visible the specific characterishcs of the medium of radio, of the radio space as such, then "Landscape Soundings" is exemplary for this kind of media art. Beginning with the live broadcast from a barely accessible area with the help of microphones, hydrophones, telephone lines and directional radio to the live mixing and live transmission - and ending with the studio production and broadcast of selections from a CD, a diversity of broadcast, recording, and transmission methods, indeed a broad palette of contemporary radio technology is thematicized. Everyday radio is roughened, brushed against the grain not just through a pre-existing, yet unusual content, but above all through self-reflection, which according to the artist's concept, is built into the project during all its phases, and through the positioning of radio in the new electronic space.