Unsafe+Sounds

The Unsafe+Sounds festival, held annually in Vienna, returns in September with a kaleidoscopic program, offering a multifaceted glimpse into the contemporary music scene and AIL is delighted to once again host one event in the program.

Program:

18:30

Affective Histories

Timotheus Vermeulen and Christian Höller in conversation with Sophie Publig

Panel Discussion, unsafe+sounds in cooperation with the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures (University of Applied Arts Vienna)

History is never simply given. It is made through the scales and materials by which the past becomes legible: from sweeping narratives and historical events to gestures, sounds, images, technical infrastructures, and seemingly minor traces of everyday life. But why does historiography feel particularly urgent today?

This conversation with Timotheus Vermeulen and Christian Höller asks how history is made, felt, mediated, and contested in the contemporary moment. Moving between aesthetic forms and media technologies, bodily gestures and digital archives, we will consider how different rhythms and scales produce different experiences of historical time. Every act of historiography also organizes relations between past, present, and future, determining what can be remembered, reactivated, inherited, or imagined from within the present. What happens when networked media continuously recombine temporalities and bring historical fragments into new constellations? From which positions can history be told, and how do some accounts of the past acquire the authority to become history? Finally, how might the ways we narrate and preserve the present shape the futures from which it will eventually be read as history?

SOPHIE PUBLIG is a Senior Scientist researching digital ecosystems. Based at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she navigates the intricate networks of online territories. She conducts independent research in the fields of media theory, critical posthumanism, post-apocalyptic narratives, and contemporary art, with a particular focus on uncovering the symbiotic relationships between technology, culture, and the environment.

TIMOTHEUS VERMEULEN is Professor of Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo and joint director of the Media Aesthetics Research Group. He was a visiting scholar in Art History at Harvard in 2023–24 and will serve as joint Principal Investigator on a project on the politics of tone at the Centre for Advanced Study in Oslo in 2027–28. He co-founded the webzine Notes on Metamodernism, co-edits the Bloomsbury series Studies in Metamodernism, and is a regular contributor to Frieze. From 2023 to 2025 he co-hosted the podcast The Cluster F Theory with BBC TV presenter Gia Milinovich.

CHRISTIAN HÖLLER is editor and co-publisher of springerin – Hefte für Gegenwartskunst. Since 1994, he has published extensively on art and cultural theory. From 2002 to 2007, he was a visiting professor at the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Geneva. He curated the film programmes Pop Unlimited? (2000) and No Wave New York 1976–84 at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen in 2010 (the latter was also presented at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna and, in 2011, at Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin). He was co-curator of the exhibition Hauntings – Ghost Box Media at Medienturm Graz and its accompanying music programme Sonic Spectres as part of steirischer herbst 2011. Since 2024 he is head of the department Cross Disciplinary Strategies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

20:15 — Martin Rovan

MARTIN ROVAN is an artist working across installations and sound. He explores the mythologies of cybernetic systems, financial markets, and speculative futures. With Lukas Kienzl, he co-runs Dead Mall Research, an online project space for sound and research.

21:15 — So Young Park

Vienna-based South Korean artist SO YOUNG PARK works at the intersection of live performance and performative installation. Her practice explores the liminal state between living and dying, as well as the transience embedded in everyday life. Starting from the question of how we should live as we move towards death, Park traces memories and sensations inscribed in the body. By transferring these onto dried flowers, which themselves retain the fragility of their life cycle, she searches for alternative states of being alive and reflects on the fragile presence of the body.

Supported by the Korean Cultural Center in Austria under the K_on_temporary programme.

21:30 —Youmna Saba

Lebanese musician, composer and musicologist YOUMNA SABA explores, in both theory and practice, the relationship between singing voice, the Arabic language and electroacoustic music. In her musical work, she expands the oud through new playing techniques. Interested in the materiality and tactility of sound, she approaches the traditional instrument as a resonant space and sound body, while her voice possesses astonishing emotional depth. The result sounds unsettlingly beautiful.

Since 2015, this international festival has been one of the most important platforms for avant-garde, experimental, and electronic music in Austria. In its 12th edition, Unsafe+Sounds continues to focus on forward-looking artistic approaches outside the mainstream.

Under this year’s festival theme, “The level sunlight still warms walls”, Unsafe+Sounds explores the affective qualities of sound. This year’s edition revolves around the return of emotion in a time of great emotional exhaustion. The program is less confrontational than in previous years. Instead, it turns to romanticism and brings sentiment and sentimentality, sensitivity and sensuality, nature, beauty, and harmony to the forefront.

Over the course of six festival days, around 50 international and local artists will perform at various venues throughout the city.