The Morning Line

On June 7, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (T-B A21), the Vienna based foundation for contemporary art founded by Francesca von Habsburg, will inaugurate The Morning Line—its most ambitious public art project to date. A four-day Festival for Contemporary Music Composition featuring 27 sound artists and nine new compositions, specially conceived for the pavilion’s sonic architecture, will kick off The Morning Line’s six months residency on Schwarzenbergplatz.

Conceived by the New York based artist Matthew Ritchie as an inherently collaborative structure, The Morning Line is an interdisciplinary platform where artists, architects, engineers, physicists, sound designers and musicians each contribute their own specialized information to create a new form: a mutable structure, with multiple expressions and narratives intertwining in its physical structure, projected video and innovative spatialized sound environments. Ritchie teamed up with design innovators Aranda/Lasch, the Music Research Centre of York University and Arup AGU to create the next leap in a fully programmable three-dimensional sound space. Based on advances in research on crystalline structures, parametric design and fractal construction units, The Morning Line is a fully scalable space; its innovative structure can adopt every configuration, it is transportable from site to site and acts as a performance space.

As The Morning Line continues to travel the world as a platform for contemporary music, and within its mandate to encourage and support the production of innovative composition wherever it tours, T-B A21 has appointed the internationally renowned, Austrian musician and sound artist Franz Pomassl to act as a guest curator for the project’s presentation in Vienna. New sonic works by Alexej Borisov (Russia), Christian Fennesz (Austria), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (Finland), Carsten Nicolai (Germany), Zsolt Olejnik (Hungary), Finnbogi Petursson (Iceland), Terre Thaemlitz (USA), Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Franz Pomassl will be premiered over the first few days of the festival. They will supplement the existing archive of 17 music and soundscape pieces selected by guest curators Florian Hecker, Bryce Dessner, Russell Haswell and ITU-MIAM/Istanbul. [event=]The Morning Line Event Page[/event]tml