jens brand in mitte (der welt) Installation
11 August – 18 September 2005
Parochialkirche, Belfry

What do the Lüneburg Heath, Lake Baikal or Mount Watzmann sound like? What gets lost when reaching for the phone? Jens Brand  demonstrates it using irony, communication and acoustics »In Mitte (der Welt)«. In the belfry, the visitor has the chance to send acoustic messages into the world which touch upon a telecommunications dimension that has disappeared from consciousness — the actual geographic distance between sender and receiver. Short audiographic pieces can be sent to freely selectable telephone numbers via a converted telephone — the Parochial Audio Messenger (PAM). Their form is based on the topographic data of the distances that lie between the Parochialkirche and the location of the receiving device. Recorded with the aid of satellite and retrieved from publicly accessible databases, the topographic course of the route is transferred into audio information — a process that is comparable to playing a record whose »mountains« and »valleys« in the vinyl make the needle vibrate.
An old dial phone »In Mitte (der Welt)« acts as an interface that transmits the dialled telephone number to a computer. The computer uses the dialling code to ascertain the location of the recipient and works out a 30 second musical piece.
It scratches and groans, slaves away and creaks over the mountains and hums over the sea. The participant experiences and communicates an acoustic journey over mountain ranges, valleys, rivers and oceans from the Parochialkirche in Berlin’s Mitte district to a selected spot somewhere in the world.