"To the point & - Zur Sache &": that terse* statement by Lawrence Weiner is painted on two sides of the evaporation tower connected to the old salt warehouse. The words are not only significant for the artist's work but can simultaneously be read as an advertisement, inviting the public to visit the ZEITGLEICH exhibition inside the warehouse. Located just below the eaves of the tower, these sparse messages are visible from afar and are distinguished from a neighbouring company logo formally through the use of a clear combination of black and white and, in terms of content, by not relating to any specific concrete point but rather designating the "point" itself as something important. The message floats, reaches out into the distance, inviting, beckoning in another direction to come to the place where the artists and the public have gathered to "come to the point". The message has also "come to the point" as an artistic contribution in itself, but it can also be seen as a message to the artists involved in the exhibition, and as such applies to all their works, as they are consonant with Weiner's view: "What we hear is the sound of material relationships at the moment of their presentation."

The organizer of the exhibition, Heidi Grundmann, has taken the rambling and dilapidated building and managed to provide every artist with a separate forum in which to carry out their intentions and also to network the various site-specific works in such a way that visitors moving through the various rooms are accompanied by many-layered - often superimposed - sound which burrows into their conciousness simultaneously ("zeitgleich"). The old warehouse is not a suitable location for presenting conventional media; there would be little point in hanging paintings on the damp walls or presenting major sculptural installations in the poor lighting conditions and exposing them to what is generally a problematical environ-ment. On the other hand, it is possible to reveal the dignity of the building - artistically speaking - through an evocation of its historical vitality and the introduction of cultural values without the use of conspicuous visual symbols. Light and sound are the primary materials; in almost imperceptible materialisation, they bring the building to life and, with their transience, make one conscious of its decay.

It is significant, in this age of image-fascination, that the artists here have chosen to present a form of human perception that relates to acoustic sources. The noise that washes over us in daily life is contrasted with the need to concentrate on sound, a sound that is rarely far from the quiet from which it arises. The exhibition would soon degenerate into a media event, however, if the artists employing contemporary media did not incorporate media criticism in their work. With her long years of experience at the ORF and her work for the Tyrolean media arts association TRANSIT, Heidi Grundmann has succeeded in attracting an international group of artists who are involved in the ongoing debate on electronic media and the impacts on our culture and society of digitally transformed and extended communication. The result is an ensemble of many very different voices. That they actually harmonise is due both to the real, impressive magic of the venerable building, which can be played on many different levels, and to the ability to wander through time and space throughout this special place. Alone the spaceousness, the change from high broad halls in the entrance area and the small rooms on the upper floor to darkened, cave-like rooms and a rather spooky cellar is one of the keys to an immediate emotional response on the part of the visitors, who find no extraneous details to distract them and can therefore devote their full attention to each installation. The ruinous state of the building also acts to sensibilize the visitor, creating an atmosphere of fragility, transience and the provisional. The artists respond with sound as their instrument, finely attuned to light or dark, to this momentary condition as an atmospheric here and now, because light, like sound, arises from emptiness, blossoms in the moment and dissolves once more into a transformed emptiness. As both sound and light are experienced in time, visitors are able to linger in the various rooms, and in the very first sound-filled hall they shrug off the hectic feeling of a normal exhibition.

No other work could be better suited as an introduction to the holistic sensual experience of this extraordinary setting than the installation of the American Bill Fontana. The artist has developed a three-part sound sculpture for the entrance hall of the salt warehouse. The work is based on thorough research of the geography and history of the location. Fontana leaps over place and time, mixing reality with fiction as he uses sound recordings to simulate the deep rumbling of the Mediterranean sea, the same sea that deposited the salt on its prehistoric retreat. The sonorous tones flow out of a long pipe, a "Wave Cannon", located in a wooden frame on the floor of the hall. These deep sounds are accompanied by high-pitched tones emitted by loudspeakers mounted on the ceiling designed to reproduce vibrations of the Mediterranean nearer the surface. With this two-part installation, visitors experience the historical space as a present space in an all-encompassing embrace, like being in the middle of the sea. This illusion is punctured, however, by sounds from another group of loudspeakers that Bill Fontana has mounted on the wall, sounds that, until relatively recently, were produced by the brine as it flowed through wooden pipes from the mine at the top of the Hall Valley to the evaporation plant at the salt works. A length of the original pipe, like the one the artist uses as a resonance chamber for a live transmission from a microphone located in the Hall Valley, has also been placed on the floor of the hall, parallel to the long "Wave Cannon" in its crate-like box, as a fragmentary and silent witness. These two tubes are the only visible sculptural moments incorporated in the installation, which is otherwise a sound sculpture, mediating the physical experience of the room through auditory perception. Like the live sounds from the Hall Valley, which vary as the weather conditions change, the pipe itself, as a relict from the past, points to the present and at the same time ("zeitgleich") to the second main hall with its row of pillars, which is devoted very much to life today. The continuously audible chorale of Fontana re-ceives here an answer in the form of a variable concert made up of many voices and very different sound sources. The Australian Ros Bandt has recorded ten different tapes in Hall and its environs with a mixture of human voices, the noises of machinery and the sounds of nature, and has processed the material to produce seven sound loops of varying lengths so that an infinity of constellations is produced. Sensors fitted to the seven pillars influence this or that sound, like a instrument dependent on the movements of the visitors in the hall. The effect of the contrasts of the voices is refreshing; the chiming of the medieval bells of Hall, the sound of horses' hooves, and the noise of a drill blend with amusing anecdotes told by the Wick sisters, who successfully fought for the preservation of the salt mine museum and are living witnesses of operations at the mine. Continuously, as with an ostinato voice, the living sound of water in the River Inn pervades the room. It welcomes and dismisses visitors in whichever direction they take to enter or leave the room.

These central rooms, where past and present blend, lead to the other spaces of the exhibition; from here visitors must decide on the sequence in which they wish to explore the various rooms and exhibits, which in turn determines the moods in which they will be emersed and the experiences they will encounter. Most closely related in terms of content (to Fontana/Bandt) is certainly the work of Andres Bosshard a Swiss artist who used three microphones to record, simultaneously, the sounds from inside and outside the building and from the summit of the Patscherkofel mountain. and then edited them to create a highly complex sound spiral. This swings upward from the middle of the room, apparently passing through the ceiling and transmitting signals into space. Bosshard has a music background and one can feel how the sound loops have been combined to form a rhythmical, stanzaic composition. Only gradually is the spherical dimension revealed over the actuality of the individual moments and the vision of a universal sound space begins to unfold. Interfering (also visually) with this spiral-shaped transmitting installation is a second installation that receives its material direct from the top of the mountain and projects the sounds of the wind, reflecting them sixfold along a spatial axis to the lower level and and into Ros Bandt's installation. Nearness and remoteness, microcosmic and macrocosmic, network themselves in the simultaneous ("zeitgleich").

Whereas Bosshard records and transmits acoustic impressions from the Patscherkofel, Gerfried Stocker and Horst Hörtner employ a computer-controlled electro-pneumatic robot (installed on the same mountain) to translate messages entered via a computer keyboard at the exhibition into the signs of the international semaphore code. Their work, which is located outside the entrance to the warehouse, shows how people place more immediate and uncritical trust in the visual message than in acoustic information when it comes to transmitting and receiving truths, even over considerable distances. Technical processes like those involved in translating an entry into a different system and then back again to a closer and more familiar one, controlled by the observer, were made transparent. Near and far let themselves be joined with the help of modern technology. The good old telescope is also available and capable of bridging such distances - a case of an old invention confirming a new.

Each of the works invites new approaches to experience, and each work reacts differently to the local conditions. While the above mentioned artists set the tone of their work with sounds in an attempt to integrate the local past and present, others treat the room as a chamber, as a three-dimensional stage; they employ the existing walls and the space they enclose as a forum for a play whose content need not have anything to do with the location. And yet the spiritual and situational affinity of the two creates a congruency which establishes a link between the heard and seen in relation to the existing space. Roberto Paci Dalò, for example, presents authentic sounds from Naples; the blows of a hammer, snippets of conversations, cries and also songs, in a constantly varying mix, envelop visitors in the specific sound chamber of the south Italian city. Spotlights, which initially permit visitors to orient themselves in the dark room, in the end serve the artist to cancel the uniformity of perception without violating the integrity of the sounds themselves. The room is repeatedly illuminated in a flash of light, creating a counterpoint of reality within the fiction. Tiny figurines on the floor add a further dimension, indicating that this is more a theatrical setting than a visual art installation.

In contrast to this event with its primarily acoustic components, José Iges and Concha Jerez from Spain make most use of sculptural details in the traditional sense in their extensive installation. They, too, communicate content for which the spatial setting is merely the resonance chamber needed to transmit the message. Between two existing holes, one in the floor and the other in the ceiling, they configure their tragic scenery against a utopian backcloth. Contemporary history, the dangers facing mankind are presented acoustically and visually in multi-layered fragments. Auditory and visual experiences combine in a mix of written and spoken language and the language displayed on television. Revolving warning lights placed under folding chairs indicate a full alarm status. Their attention focused by the warning lights, visitors discover the various heterogeneous elements, like a TV film that is continually interrupted by the brief message "Towards landscape". That makes the trivial story on the TV screen even more banal. Next to that is a ladder leading upwards which has been invaded by a tangle of ghastly Barbie dolls, figures from the world of science fiction. They are being bombarded with political propaganda. Concealed behind a slightly open door, a poetic, utopian element remains unassailable; it can only be imagined and can only be summoned through rational thought. The spiritual and moral quality of this work derives explicitly from its multimedia fracture lines, from the irreconcilability of the components, with several visually presented details colliding with the acoustic elements and leaving no room for didactic arguments.

While in this work the immediate present is taken as the measure for heaven and hell, the three Austrians Sodomka, Breindl and Math delve into the Middle Ages. In those times people were accustomed to simultaneously recognise familiar representations of holy Christian stories on exemplary panel paintings, an ability that seemed to have been lost to us and is only now being reactivated in a completely different form through our modern understanding of digital recording techniques. The artists employ the irregular structure of the side tract to project figures of angels and devils, taken from actual paintings, sailing through the air in a spooky dance. The repertoire of images gliding over the projections and recesses of the walls conjures up an analogy between that old mode of perception and the potential for cognition deriving from innovative forms of image production, between distance and the proximity of flying and fleeing images within a framework of increasing and decreasing volumes of sound.

Three of the other works take a completely unequivocal look at modern media. Helmut Mark projects a colour videotape that he recorded on a long car ride through Hall onto one of the walls of the side tract. Its content relates to the works discussed above in that it refers to the immediate physical environment of the salt warehouse but in this case, by means of the virtual image. In apparent identical time and place the viewer experiences the ride without an illusionist realism developing. This very direct video exhibit - and the sound image in the form of a car radio is merely an accompaniment - provides an important visual counterweight to the many sound-based works. The work confirms that we accept video images as normal, as something with which we are familiar. Equally straightforward and direct is the acoustic work produced with the help of advanced digital recording technology by Stoph Sauter. His record-ings from idyllic mountain pastures are packaged ironically in headphones garlanded with wild flowers so that the naturally loud sounds can be converted to whispers to be experienced by the individual alone. Where-as Helmut Mark uses the wall as a projection screen, John Blake makes it dissolve into the spatial experience of a stage. Blake tears apart the projection and the sound of the simple sequence of walking feet, and thus disrupts the illusion of an approaching figure, but without destroying it; the impression remains of an unreal and yet physical act, because a new feeling of incomprehensible depth is created in the space.

Descending into a cellar is seldom experienced without a clammy feeling. In selecting the damp cellar complex for his "Green Light" light and sound installation, Robert Adrian was counting on his audience being in a serious, not to say fearful mood. On entering the dark front area, visitors are met with a lively babble of voices, which contrasts with the cool green light radiating evenly over a low partition wall from the rear area of the cellar. The light is beamed upwards from a hundred green fluorescent lamps placed in rows on the floor; it comes from the ground and not, as is customary, from the ceiling. A sculptural element, therefore, makes the space inaccessible, other-worldly, outside of the ego. In spite of the similar-ity of material used it re-minds one less of Dan Flavin's fluorescent tube work than the 500 shiny brass rods in Walter de Maria's "Broken Kilometre". It invokes a similar feeling of something imperceivable, something infinite; and this feeling arises despite the fact that one cannot overlook the sober material that is the source of spiritual light. Time, too, seems to expand into timelessness, to dissolve into eternity. Into this eternal quiet, the present intrudes with the living murmur from the loudspeakers. That mitigates the unlived-in cellar atmosphere. Instant and eternity meet. As the eye adjusts to the light, the impression is of a shift to a bright, almost whitish yellow, so that one could be reconciled were it not for the sudden scream of a jet fighter overwhelming the human voices. That triggers personal memories of air-raid shelters, dungeons and graves - the past crashing in on the present. That is how Adrian "comes to the point". That is how Adrian confirms his claim that "media culture is virtual history" in the form of a happening which makes it a personal experience for the audience. We have also come full circle to Lawrence Weiner when Adrian continues: "Media culture is a multiplicity of views of a single moment - the moment of recording, of capture by the recording medium. Past, present and future collapse at the recorded moment into the radiation of light and sound."

* This is a pun on "Knapp", the name of the company whose logo shares the wall with Weiner's text. Knapp in German means terse, sparse, concise. (ed.)