It’s hard to know who to listen to right now. With the dawn of the internet and the rise of social media, we’ve each become trapped in cultural bubbles of our own making, driven by personal algorithms, closed networks and confirmation bias to amplify, reinforce and repeat our existing ideologies. The four-day “Echo Chamber” sound exhibition brings this metaphorical term to its acoustic root—of sounds reverberating in the resonant enclosure of Großer Wasserspeicher. 

The event will feature a multi-sensory and interdisciplinary show spanning the four different rings circling the Prenzlauer Berg’s water tower, where a limited number of audience members can walk through and experience this crossover of visual arts, storytelling, and post-club sounds in the cyclic structure of the space, mirroring the cyclic nature of life, cultural movements and social progress. 

The exhibition will feature new collaborations in AV installations by i.Ruuu and Petja Ivanova, Emilie Palmelund and Oli XL, as well as a videos by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė of Young Girl Reading Group and Hans-Henning Korb. There will be an installation by Tea Stražičić from the series “THE LONE LONG BOY”, sculptures by Johanna Odersky and Laura Welker, and imagery by Alice Z Jones. There will also be a series of sound interventions of unplugged instrumentals and electronics by Alpha Maid and Battle-Ax.

Emphasizing the nature of the synthetic, while focusing on the materiality of globalized and networked society, “Echo Chamber” oftentimes blends the virtual with the physical in an effort to highlight the heterogeneous, distributed space of our mass-mediated ecology, while acknowledging that what starts on the internet, more often than not materializes in real space. It’s important to look outside of ourselves and resist the allure of selective hearing.