the fact that we can enter a bookshop and buy a map of the world with no uncharted areas on it should not mislead us into assuming that we have a complete picture of our terrestrial "lebensraum". i would even dare to make the liberating statement that we haven't got a clue. our tiny active consciousness suggests to our egos a coherent picture, and what is unknown appears as a gap that has to be closed. in my opinion most machines have been built so as to be able to close such gaps better and faster. and yet from my own experience i can say with certainty that machines do not solve problems but create them. so if we primarily employ communications machines to store, reproduce or possibly duplicate (broadcast) information, it means we want to keep the lid on our picture of the world; we are constantly REPAIRING. when i breathe in, i see time and place differently than when i breathe out, and differently again at the turning points between the two. when i concentrate on a time here, i feel another there and still more in between. i have found sounds that glide back and forth between these times, that cross spaces and sound of them when they arrive at the here and now, again ready to move on.

i couldn't catch them. what was captured electro-magnetically on tape was simply their shadows. how deep is the present, in time and place? i built a SOUND BRIDGE because i assumed that this space would be big, would at least comprise whole cities and be vibrant with the living present.

i was wrong. all i produced was holes. holes in the present.

BERN sound bridge, an open-air hörspiel in concert, four-hour uninterrupted live transmission from the sound installation on the "lorraine" railway viaduct and feedback transmission to the exhibition hall in the BERN kunsthaus.

it is almost ten p.m. as planned, i leave my matrix mixer in the kunsthaus, leave the real and virtual sound space of the transmission, enter its background, the soundscape of the city, get into my car, switch on the radio and hear the musicians who have already arrived at the bridge answering those still playing in the kunsthaus. i drive down to the bridge. since i know how the microphones are set up i can sound my horn and hear it in the radio. so i blow the horn and a short time later i hear my echo in the radio. i sound the horn three times in quick succession, and receive three short answers. but the sound of the horn from the car next to me is even louder, and the driver's gesture very expressive. but i have to laugh because now his signal is heard nationwide, too. i turn off and drive down to the river, to a superb solo by phil up in the kunsthaus, the "farewell solo", as the kunsthaus closes at 10 p.m. and the audience have to leave the "concert", have to walk away and first cross the everyday sounds of the city before being attracted by the sounds from the bridge and inundated once again in the continuing continuum of our sonic stream.

before getting out i remain sitting in the car for a oment. in the car i can hear the sounds in front of me and further on above me.

but i have no time to dwell on the sounds because i can see butch morris down there checking the microphone, and up above over the arch christian buess is bent desperately over the mixer located there.

so i sprint past all the people standing around everywhere listening and up the steep steps without any railings, and finally arrive breathless 35m above the black nocturnal waters of the river aare. the 22.30 intercity roars through the concert space only 20cm above my head. the bridge can be heard to sway. deep resonances from inside the concrete chambers accompany the noise of the train wheels reflected by the surroundings

down below butch is beginning. his sounds multiply in the arches of the viaduct, circulate through what is now an empty "kunsthaus", and emerge again muted. he seems to hear them sometimes, for his sounds control the dispersing sonic arrays. up here, exposed to the cool night air, it sounds as if a gigantic sonic ball were being created right beneath me, filling the whole of the 150m high arch. i feel how the size of the sphere depends on the position of the slider controls between my fingers, and how butch himself reacts to the slightest change i make. we forget the world around us.

jacques widmer has had an idea and is climbing into the lower deck walkway formed by the concrete beams carrying a huge gong. with just a miner's lamp to light his way he enters what is like a tunnel with an arched roof leading more and more steeply down into a mine. here you would never think that you are 35m above the ground, and that you have an audience out there in the night separated by just a few centimetres of concrete. jacques finds the microphone used to capture the internal resonances of the sound bridge. in these chambers i found an echo lasting over 9 seconds, so long do the reverberations continue to roll back and forth.

jacques, somewhat sceptical by now, is thinking that the microphone won't be working again anyway. he checks the transistor radio he has smuggled in and waits for a quieter passage so as to be sure that if ... at least 32 speakers scream. the sound engineers snatch their headphones off. the soundquake almost causes the bridge to collapse. the waves wash over the whole of the country at the speed of light. while the echoes in the acoustic surroundings subside, their electro-magnetic signals set off on a long journey; communicated along the transmission lines, amplified by the radio stations and directed by the antennas, they are projected into space, where they are still flying now, four light years away.

no-one knows what all our sounds, images, dreams, our news will get up to out there.

and clearly we haven't got the time to think about it. we continue to "news" away even though the efficiency of our radio stations is presumably less than 7 percent in terms of the certainty that the human news actually finds a human ear. just imagine what the chances are of finding a human ear that understands what we are transmitting, let alone enjoys it ....

with such a huge outlay and such a poor return, we can be absolutely sure that we are producing a pretty gigantic noise, a noise of increasingly cosmic dimensions.

microphones. that's what we call those things we speak into. can we hear anything like as far as we can shout?

within a radius of some one hundred light years everyone must now know what kind of a state we are in. if we were to meet anyone they would know more about us than we can tell about ourselves. what lessons can i learn from these sound accidents, or should i say "media accidents"? everything i know does not seem to amount to much. it does not even seem to be sufficient for me to develop something like coherent orientation

i exist in a temporal and sonic space, where it is still unclear which is top and which is bottom.

from the sounds that are audible to the human ear we can conclude that we "really" hear down to a period of 1/20 of a second. discrete impulses occurring at shorter intervals sound like a continuum, like pitch. sounds in the order of 1/20 of a second form a solid sonic space with a presence. it has a diameter in the air of 1/20 of 340m, or 17m. that is our reliable "sonic present". all the sounds we want to hear simultaneously must find room in those 17m.

when i distribute speakers in a concert space, i exceed this horizon of the present and soon produce confusion. i don't fully understand everything that happens, but sometimes it sounds very good.

i could give you some pretty reliable instructions which would be pretty sure to enable you to produce some good results. if you gave me a job as a sound engineer, that's what i would try to do.

i like the work, honest.

but there is another way.

i am here in a broadcasting studio. i listen, turn my head and walk up and down. nothing. the room has no sound. no breath. almost dead. it is insulated, screened, cabled, connected to a thousand machines. a kind of intensive care unit. as a sound engineer i won't be able to revive this space from its coma.

i don't quite understand that. i always have the same feeling of unease when i enter a recording studio, or when i am in a broadcasting studio. there is always something missing. something i would normally have expected: SOUND SPACE.

just imagine. there are about 100,000 people around here listening to the radio or watching television - 100,000 little speakers in separate locations throughout the city. 100,000 speakers spread over an area of two or three square kilometres. and we are sitting here and can't do anything. acoustic dark-ness has descended on the city, day and night. hundreds of thousands of little points, each of them all alone, isolated, cut off, windows closed. and we are sitting here, cut off, isolated, somewhat somnambulistic.

i am serious when i say that we understand very little. in fact shockingly little, if we consider the range of the machinery we have linked ourselves up to. with that ring of satellites now wrapped round us and growing denser all the time at an altitude of about 36,000 km turning the whole world into a kind of electronic living room.

in the zone between the overcrowded living room and the increasingly neglected outside area, there is a gaping media hole.

today's media structures are still command-based, information channels for one-way communication. for "news" in the data networks timid attempts at interaction and feedback are being initiated. but people are still thinking in terms of virtual realities, in mirror images of reflections. these data streams form con-necting networks, electronic links between isolated spaces that are becoming smaller and smaller.

in this way we do not transmit information into the space around us but rather we project them "inside" ourselves with increasing brutality.

hypnotized, we stare at one point in front of ourselves and rob ourselves of spatial perception.

so as to be able to hear the depths of space, we could do with a SOUND OBSERVATORY ( or a media observatory). it ought to be possible for us to listen permanently to the depths of our lebensraum so as to develop a coherent conception of space and time, to draft and create space-time architectures that are in harmony with our lebensraum, and which in addition could themselves create LEBENSRAUM.

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