6x Must-sees at STRP Festival

How do you train yourself to be more receptive to others, people, plants, and animals? By listening! Lucky for you, art and tech festival STRP is all about the art of listening this year. From 13 April to 16, STRP reflects on this theme in many ways throughout the city center. If you ask us, the entire festival is an absolute must-visit! Need help figuring out where to begin? These six must-sees (or must-listens) will help you get started!

Omniphonium @De Heuvel

Human hearing is generally good at determining where sound comes from, yet most audio setups only have one or two sources. Omniphonium is an installation that fully immerses visitors using multiple hidden speakers. The intuitive audio controller allows you to play with the spatial dimensions of sound in De Heuvel. A little fact about the design: it's byLeopold Inkapööl, who graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven last year. Cool!

Erratic Weather @Microstad

What does climate change sound like? Erratic Weather displays changing atmospheric conditions in an overwhelming multimedia experience. The system extracts weather information from an online database and processes it in real-time into a visual and immersive sound composition. Immerse yourself in the life cycle of swirling phenomena such as typhoons, hurricanes and tropical cyclones. Erratic Weather is a design by digital artist MAOTIK and cellist, composer, and producer Maarten Vos.

Workshop: Deep Listening @Microstad | 16 April

This workshop introduces you to the origins and legacy of Pauline Oliveros. The Deep Listening practice, developed by Oliveros in collaboration with IONE and Heloise Gold, seeks to expand our awareness of sound and how it travels through time and space, creating a dynamic of interaction, attention, vibration, and resonance. You will engage in body energy exercises, sonic meditations, dream consciousness, and improvisation. Sound artist Ximena Alarcón will guide the workshop.

Cosmic Radio @Microstad

Who still listens to the radio? Well, apparently everyone. Almost 50 years ago, scientists accidentally discovered a mysterious, constant sound during a study of radio waves. This radiation did not come from Earth, the sun, or our galaxy. It turned out to be cosmic background radiation, the oldest electromagnetic radiation in the universe. And we, unconsciously, are still listening to it. How does that work? Shock Forest Group has figured that out for you.

Le Silence des Particules @St Catherine’s Church

Even when things seem quiet, there is a lot of unobservable activity in and around us. For example, when we talk, thousands of vortices are created that cause invisible particles to move around us. Water, air, light, and every gram of our bodies are made of the same elementary particles. Guillaume Cousin's air sculpture amplifies the 'voice' of those particles with a ring of smoke. Slowly, the smoke slows down, then suddenly breaks and disappears. The rings are not that different from us: a purely natural phenomenon, a complex vibration of quantum fields. An absolute must-see, if you’d ask us. You can visit Le Silence des Particules for free without a festival ticket at St Catherine’s Church, in the center of Eindhoven.

Closing keynote: The Art of Listening @Microstad

Philosopher and essayist Miriam Rasch thinks it's time for the ethics of listening. In Western philosophy, the search for knowledge and truth is strongly linked to seeing: we must first see before we believe. What does it mean to really listen to each other? How can we listen to animals, plants or ecosystems with our whole body? How does an oral culture resonate? And what is the sound of silence? Miriam will reflect on her experiences of STRP Festival 2023 on the final day and share a personal interpretation of the art of listening.