The WHISPERING WALL is a collective of portable, interactive, individual audio devices. Connected to and through the internet, these sound-units play audio works, stored in a virtual cloud. Each Whispering Wall performs its own, specific Work. It’s a global, Internet-of-Things work of art.

The idea behind the Whispering Wall Project is to sound-connect places on a global scale and to create virtual places using audio. Audioworks are stored in a cloud and can be played or performed by Whispering Walls all over the world, by the use of Whispering Wall Units. Each Whispering Wall plays its own specific audiowork, which is based on where it is situated.

“Walls have always had ears. I now give them a voice.”

The Whispering Wall enables me artistically to independently create sound works the way I want to. It challenges me, providing me with the scale and technical possibilities I need and at the same time forcing me to rethink sound and the way I (want to) use it.

Content-wise and from a philosophical point of view, the Whispering Wall has to do with change or resistance to change, with time and space and with various ontological questions. By connecting places, by creating virtual rooms using sound only, the Whispering Wall is a giant, virtual, audio world, that invisibly and inaudibly converges with the ‘real’ world. It is a heterotopia, or more precisely, it creates heterotopiae, liminal places. You enter a world in a world, which is existent and non-existent at the same time.

From a social point of view, the audioworks are often based on or represent social and personal relationships, experiences, thoughts and ideas. Like a train of thought or the little voice in your head; memories, thoughts, conversations, songs, sounds or music: the virtual sounds in the cloud are like the virtual sounds in our heads.

From a technical point of view, the Whispering Wall is an internet-of-things work of art. All audio works are collected in the cloud, and every unit is connected to this cloud, always and everywhere, forming a collective of individual entities. Every unit is unique and receives its own, particular audio-part.

From an audio and musical point of view, this is a new way of listening to audio, a new way of composing and decomposing, of constructing and deconstructing. Audiofiles are cut up and divided over many small speakers, even over large distances, which gives a unique spacial effect and brings numerous new possibilities.