Live Concert @KAMUNA: Exoplanetary Fictions

"Rewilding" is Başak Günak’s ongoing artistic research project on the eponymous ecological concept — an experimental form of nature conservation that aims to revoke human control and poses the question of origin and future of ecosystems. Günak’s work is approaching this topic through a compositional perspective, aiming to find methods of rewilding through sound itself. 

In this performance “On Rewilding: Rust”, Günak reorients this perspective towards Mars, drawing inspiration from approaches to preserve the planet’s environment. The piece is fictionally set during one Martian day on 26 November 1971, the day before the Soviet Mars 2 probe crashed to the surface of Mars and became the first human object on the planetary body. 

The performance takes its inspiration from a publication by microbiologist and astrobiologist C. Cockell and G. Horneck, a proposition to prevent ecological damage on Mars.

Duration: ca. 30 minutes
Instrumentation: Electronics, EMS Synthi A, acoustic instruments, field recordings, voice, metal plates, transducer.

Distant Earth: A Planetary Choir imagines the Earth as a distant exoplanet, listening to it from the outside rather than from within human-centered experience. The work weaves together human voices, animal calls, environmental vibrations, electromagnetic signals, technological noise, synthetic/AI-generated voices, immersive 3D recordings, and sonified sounds derived from EUMETSAT’s satellite-based Earth observation datasets, forming an incomplete and fluid planetary choir. These sounds are not organized according to cultural importance or human familiarity, nor are they divided into center and periphery. Instead, they are given different orbits and weights through their physical properties, signal density, sense of distance, and spatial expansiveness, while the human voice is repositioned as one signal within a planetary sonic ecology. Through spatial composition, these heterogeneous sounds drift, collide, and resonate across the listening space, sensing Earth not as a fixed home, but as a strange, living body that continuously emits signals. From this distant perspective, the familiar becomes strange, and listening becomes a way to perceive the entangled voices of humans, non-humans, machines, data, and the planet itself.

This electroacoustic performance deals with the idea of latency in the act of processing information. Time plays a crucial role in how we perceive situations, it is the body of our creation, the modifier of our thinking processes. Depending on our perception of time we work differently with given realities. 

During the performance the sound of the room is being recorded and processed with a latency of 30 sec to 1 min. It is being harmonized through resonators and frequency shifters. The work consists technically of the surrounding sound, while it is hyper crystallized and perceived as resonant vibrations, that are adding geometrical precision to the situation in the room and aiming to direct active attention to the sequence of events. 

This work is analitical but is influenced by Zazen at the same time, it operates inbetween focus and dissipation. It is supposed to rest in the point of balance between the center and the periphery — between the point of intense gravity and the point of entropy. 

Following the concert, Dr. Jan-Tage Kühling (founding director of Goethe-Institut Armenia in Yerevan) and Varoujan Chetirian (co-curator of "Stellar Frequencies“) invite you to the Music Balcony for an artist talk with Hertzlab & Stellar Frequencies residents Başak Günak x Vardan Harutyunyan.

The transcultural cultural and sound art project Stellar Frequencies explores the entanglements of space research, politics, and planetary thinking between Armenia and Germany. Starting point is the space center Aragats in the Armenian mountains, site of the first SETI conference. The project brings together artists who renegotiate the gaze into the cosmos decolonially and experimentally. The moderators give an introduction to the project and talk with Hertzlab residents and Stellar Frequencies artists Başak Günak and Vardan Harutyunyan about their work. Join the exchange!