Sen City

SenCity began with a single concept: anthropogenic noise.

The sounds that emerge because humans shape, move, transform, and technologically extend the world around them.

From this starting point emerged an exhibition that is not about noise, but an invitation to listen more carefully.

What sounds are created by human activity? What do they reveal about our tools, our cities, our machines, and our desires? At what point does noise become meaning?

SenCity makes audible how humans bring the world into resonance—and how those sounds, in turn, shape us.

From these questions, the project develops a walkable acoustic world. The exhibition space is not merely filled with sound; it becomes a model in itself: an artificial city composed of voices, technical noises, fragments, resonances, and newly constructed sound environments. Visitors move through an anthropophony—a world of human-generated sound in which nature, culture, and technology can no longer be clearly separated.

Drawing on a combination of field recordings and constructed sounds, the installation simultaneously simulates and reimagines both culture and nature. Familiar sonic elements blend with invented ones, creating a city that feels recognisable yet strangely transformed.

The experience is conceived exclusively for indoor space. This limitation becomes its strength.

The exhibition itself functions as an acoustic coordinate system where every step can trigger a perceptible change. Visitors approach voices, move away from sound sources, enter dense sonic zones, or allow sounds to fade into the background once again. Listening is not treated as passive reception, but as movement through a carefully composed and fragile sound landscape.

Invisible yet essential to the experience is the precision of the tracking system. It allows the acoustic environment to respond with remarkable subtlety—not symbolically, but physically. Visitors do not simply listen to an audio track; they enter a spatial sound structure that reacts to position, direction, and proximity. The result is the sensation of moving through an alternative acoustic reality.

At its core, SenCity explores how technology changes our relationship to sound. Humans make objects vibrate, record noises, manipulate them, transform them into data, and recombine them into new forms. Sounds are no longer merely traces of the world; they are also constructions. They can be captured, designed, relocated, invented, and placed into entirely new contexts.

This transformation becomes audible throughout the installation. Out of a potentially endless chaos of sounds emerges an artificial scenario—a carefully composed city of meaning.

The project reveals that sound is far more than transmitted vibration. It tells stories about materials, surfaces, machines, bodies, spaces, and ways of thinking. In SenCity, these elements merge into an atmosphere that is dense, urban, unsettling, sometimes familiar, and sometimes entirely strange.

The system also provided the foundation for a dedicated treasure hunt for children. The SenGang, a group of young detectives, is searching for a missing bell. Following clues hidden throughout the sonic city, they discover sounds that gradually lead them further through the story. We developed the characters and wrote the narrative that guides this adventure.

Visitors can accompany Dizzy Sinus, Herby Krawall, Kathi Lärm, Bertl Ton, Rainer Klang, Samuel Schall, Flüster Lisl, and Vicky Fanfare on their search, discovering the city through curiosity, listening, and play.

SenCity is an exhibition explored with the ears.

And the more closely one listens, the clearer it becomes: the human world does not simply produce sound.

It is constantly composing itself.