"Whether we like it or not, digital systems have revolutionized the way in which we define, perceive and process sounds - like all other data. As digitization for immediate playing or transmission is simply a record/playback process which, among other things, permits electronic manipulation, we need to rethink not only such concepts as "real time" and "live" but also the terms "author", "original", "recipient", "work", "space" etc. A recording made during a performance, for example, and immediately transmitted in real time or live, is no different from any other recorded and stored material and can be mixed with (recorded/sampled) material from any other time and place. In today's digital archives, all the recordings are timeless, placeless and ageless. The re-activation of material from storage for a program, performance or installation transfers all the fragments - no matter where or when they were recorded - to the same here and now; they exist at the same time (= "zeitgleich"). Another reason for choosing the title "ZEITGLEICH" (= same time, simultaneous) for this event and the parallel exhibition was because the word relates to the problems of handling several installations in one (physical) space and also to the question of the simultaneous reception of transmitted works by the viewer/listener. These subjects, and many more besides, which are relevant for artists and composers working in the field of sound composition and/or media composition today, and also for the reception and interpretation of their works, are addressed by the series of events entitled ZEITGLEICH". (From the ZEITGLEICH brochure published at the end of April 1994 as an invitation to and source of information on the symposium of the same name and all the subsequent items in the ZEITGLEICH project)

ZEITGLEICH is a product of the work of a large number (accurate quantification is no longer possible) of artists/composers, critics, theorists, engineers, photographers, and organizers in constantly changing configurations. Nor is this catalogue to be seen as the culmination of the project; it is just another station along the way.

The catalogue introduces a symposium that was held at the beginning of June 1994 in the ORF's Tyrol studio in Innsbruck at the instigation of Lothar Knessl and Christian Scheib, special curators for music at the Austrian Ministry of Education and the Arts. The symposium attracted leading artists/composers from different countries and generations, who presented their highly divergent approaches (based on their own practical work) to the subject of "Sound Installation and Media Composition in the Digital Age" in a densely packed program of lectures, performance/lectures and lecture/ performances. In this context media composition was not treated as composition for the radio, TV and cinema, i.e. signature tunes, film and radio play music etc, but as "composing the radio" (Klaus Schöning). At Zeitgleich an attempt was also made to update this "composing the radio" to take account of today's and forthcoming networked environments based on communications technologies, in which the radio has become a media component. "If Cage is right, and modern music or - as he puts it - the art of organizing sounds must derive its materials from the entropy of the channels, we must not recoil from the increasing entropy of the real networks. However sacrilegious it may sound, art must invade the new channels and go for their technological roots, as it were. Art must play with the channels, not in them." (Wolfgang Hagen)

At the rigidly structured two-day symposium - as in this catalog - it was not a question of supplying universal definitions on the subject of their own practical work) to the subject of "Sound Installation and Media Composition in the Digital Age", but rather of finding the closest possible approximations to the great variety of contemporary artistic practice, deriving from - or reacting to - a wide variety of traditions, and to the theories generated by this practice.

The intention was that the invited speakers not simply arrive, deliver their lectures, and immediately depart (as is often the case) but to remain and participate in discussion and exchange of ideas with each other and with the other participants. Most of the lecturers were, in fact, able to remain and take part not only in the symposium but also to attend the following seminar to which about thirty composers, artists, culture journalists and organizers from Austria, Germany and Italy had also been invited, with the help of small grants, to attend the event.

At a small hotel in Mutters near Innsbruck, all the speakers and seminar participants spent two days in intensive debate and discussion - in working groups large and small, on walks through the countryside, even swimming, and of course eating and drinking. No record of the seminar is included in this catalog, nor elsewhere. For this part of the "Zeitgleich" project there was no thematic or organizational framework, apart from the general topic, and no assignments to be completed. Nor was there an audience, only active participants. The fact that the seminar proved so rewarding for participants was due in no small part to the decision taken not to set up microphones so as to be able to communicate the contents to a wider public at a later date, in this publication for example. That means the contents are lost for ever for those who were not there. For those who were, their impacts will endure. Given the positive outcome of earlier closed working sessions without exposure to an audience, the organizers from "TRANSIT" were convinced that it must be possible to organize a personal dialogue between representatives of different generations, disciplines, theories, experiences and traditions, even in a society that insists on dragging everything into the public gaze, for the simple reason that there is no substitute.

The exhibition was held in the summer of 1994 in the old salt warehouse in Hall in Tirol, which is planned to become an arts centre. The warehouse has been empty, a ruin of the industrial age, since the salt mines in the Hall Valley closed in the sixties. The desolate condition of the building and the distance from all mainstream art facilities was seen as a challenge to which great seriousness of purpose was committed by all the artists invited - at very short notice and with restricted funding - to develop installations for the location. The invitations were sent to artists - including some of the speakers at the "ZEITGLEICH Symposium" - from varying age groups and completely different geographical and artistic backgrounds. But they did have one thing in common: they all had considerable experience of collaborating on projects with other artists and/or engineers, and shared the awareness that art - like everything else today - no longer exists only in special spaces but in spaces open to the world. Which means that not only can information and all types of inter-ference penetrate those spaces but, vice-versa, transmission outwards is also possible - via telephone, E-mail, fax, radio, TV, or simply by the emission of noise, light etc. All the artists therefore knew that "their" installation sites within the warehouse (which they were free to choose themselves) would be penetrated by sounds and light, both from other parts of the building and from outside, including a main road in front and an expressway ramp along one side. Even the noise of the stone sculptors, who had been allocated a site in the field adjoining the salt warehouse at the last minute, was accepted by the artists as a normal part of their environment, or even as a component in their own work. In fact, some of the artists integrated live sounds transmitted from elsewhere (Andres Bosshard, Bill Fontana) or the daily radio program (Helmut Mark) in their work, or they them-selves transmitted sounds from the exhibition (Bosshard, Loibner, Fontana). Indeed part of the exhibition was a radio station transmitting on an ORF live-broadcast frequency, which could be heard within a radius of a few miles. In addition to the very short message sent into space by Andres Bosshard, the transmissions included jingles by Bernhard Loibner and brief information on the exhibition itself in Turkish, Serb, Croat and Slovene. Apart from that the live transmission program offered 24-hour meditative radio of a different kind, based on the live sounds captured by a microphone placed (as part of Bill Fontana's installation) in an hollowed-out tree trunk which had formed part of the old brine pipeline in the Hall Valley.

The "ZEITGLEICH Exhibition" thus became a team composition based on works that were open on the one hand and yet related carefully to a context of networked spaces and times on the other. It also reached well beyond the salt warehouse - even into the Internet (Gerfried Stocker/Horst Hörtner) - and yet was firmly anchored in it at the same time.

Visitors to the exhibition came from all age groups and social sectors, and they came without threshold anxiety, often repeatedly, bringing with them new friends and other family members. A German/English brochure with texts by the artists and photographs and illustrations of the exhibition itself was available free of charge. It is now out of print but some of the texts and illustrations have been included in this catalog, while others, the texts by Sodomka/Breindl and Gerfried Stocker for example, have been revised and expanded. This catalog also includes a sensitive and vivid report by the German art critic Renate Puvogel of her navigation of the Zeitgleich Exhibition, while Heimo Ranzenbacher has developed and extended his original review of the exhibition (published in the "SteirerKrone", a daily newspaper) in which he focuses on, what I believe to be, the very important and stimulating distinction he discovers between opaque and transparent art.

The "ZEITGLEICH Exhibition" was an exemplary demonstration of the fact that artists in this field have to collaborate with engineers of all persuasions, to such an extent that in some cases the engineer becomes the co-author. As representative of the many engineers involved in the project, Gerhard Wieser has written an article for this catalog. I should like to take this opportunity to thank Hans Soukup, Andreas Unterpertinger, Gerhard Wieser and their co-workers for their engagment and effort in installing and dismantling the works and for their technical services during the exhibition, to which the composers Rupert Huber and Gerhard Mittermayer also made a major contribution. Rupert Huber has written a short text for this publication based on his experience as technical attendant during the exhibition and in addition has created two radio compositions from his intensive involvement with the exhibition. Both compositions have been broadcast on "ORF Kunstradio" as part of "ZEITGLEICH - the Radio Projects", comprised of works made by some of the artists from material used in the exhibition. This series of programs is continuing as this catalog goes to press.

Unlike "ZEITGLEICH - the Stone Sculpture Symposium", whose material results have in the meantime found sites in the city of Hall, the live product of the "ZEITGLEICH Exhibition" in the salt warehouse has passed irrevocably into the memories of the artists and visitors. All that is left for the moment is the work of Lawrence Weiner on the wall outside; but that too is more of a reminder of the exhibition, the first of its type to demonstrate the potential of a neglected indus-trial building as both the setting and object of an art in which perspective is seen to reach at least as far into the depths of time as of space.

An exhibition like ZEITGLEICH, which could be switched on, i.e. brought to life, and switched off and obliterated again from one second to the next, and which was never the same from one visit to the next because the various components were constantly coming and going and re-arranging themselves to form new constellations, cannot be presented using conventional documentation techniques, least of all the traditional print medium of a catalog. The CD-ROM disc released together with this catalog at least offers an impression of the acoustic and visual dimensions of the installations.

Those parts in the "ZEITGLEICH" project that have been realised to date are a clear vindication of the "Transit" model. TRANSIT is a not-for-profit association devoted to creating space for the practice and theory of a transient, non-market oriented art in the contemporary landscape of modern communications media through an innovative combination of public funding and the know-how, production technology and transmission facilities of a public broadcasting corporation in the belief that it is very important that artists address the subject of the so-called new media and the effects of digitization on our culture.

I should like to thank all those who have played a part in making "ZEITGLEICH" possible, the artists, theorists, engineers, organizers, the Hall Public Works Department, and the sponsors, especially the special music curators of the Austrian Ministry of Culture and the Arts, Lothar Knessl and Christian Scheib, who are far more than mere distributors of public largesse.