From Level Zero
HD Audio/Video, 2024
27'44


From level zero is an audio-visual portrait of Vienna's Donau City district. It was created as part of the transdisciplinary research project, which has been running in the district for about a year.

Vienna’s Donau City – built on a former garbage dump – unites a round of residential and commercial buildings, including the tallest buildings in the city. As a modern center, this part of the city was planned using a level concept that relocated the infrastructure for automobility (roads, parking garages, etc.) underground (Levels ­–1 to –3). The car-free “Level 0” connects the buildings and is a gusty and drafty open space which gives a feeling of distance between the building structures. 

With the Austria Center Vienna centrally located in Donau City, the district is an important location for the international conference industry and congress tourism in Vienna. In the global ranking of congress events by the ICCA (International Congress and Convention Association), Vienna once again took first place worldwide, ahead of Lisbon and Paris. 

The audio track of this portrait mixes voices, roaring traffic, wind noises, etc. and the natural vibration of the buildings recorded by structure-borne sound microphones. Along these acoustic conditions, an auditory inventory of the spaces of the district and its buildings was created. The visual sequences of the film consist of two recordings of specific local conditions taken at different times of day at the same location. In the cross-fading of the identical shots, this photographic depiction emphasizes light and time as structural elements of the buildings. The result is 19 intervals of audiovisual entanglement, in whose experimental arrangement the structural constitution of the urban district begins to oscillate between stage space and protagonist role.