Just Jamming
How can groups from social hotspots who are difficult to reach, like drug addicts or refugees, be included in Urban Arts Education? Media designer and artist Peter Hutter and his collective Konverter offer sound mixing workshops in public spaces or in open arts education training spaces in Graz to reach out to diverse groups.
People battling addictions are often confronted with a feeling of pointlessness and emptiness in life, and state that they don’t find joy in doing things they liked before when they were sober. According to Peter, there is a need to recast these activities, and to open up new areas of interest.
In his Synthesizer Workshop, both people with addictions and university students as well as musicians showed up and jammed together. In this way, people from societal groups from very different educational and social backgrounds, with different ways of communication and behaviour, came together.
In another setting, Peter takes a baby pram, converted to a sound mixing station to public places and interacts with the people with different backgrounds and languages, teaching them how to use the instrument and jamming with them
“Mixing music has functioned really well as a non-verbal mode of communication […] Then you have shared emotions, and through this communication you notice right away–he’s responding to my audio output–it leads to communication and joy, and a certain intimacy. And they’ll learn something about audio synthesis for the first time […] without really knowing it.”
Amid, a young man from Afghanistan, was attracted by this mobile sound station. Though they didn’t have a common verbal language, he soon started together with Peter to create their own sound design and to react to each other’s sounds.
“It felt like a form of conversation between two different ways of life. We laughed a lot together and felt very connected. I never met Amid again, but I had the feeling that this situation broke a barrier and had a positive impact on a person that is very much excluded from public life”.
Open access and making electronic musical instruments available can abduct individuals from their self-perception, break down social barriers and set social impulses. And that happens “only” through approaching each other and jamming together.
URB_ART spoke to the artist Peter Hutter, who, together with his collective Konverter (www.konverter.cc), runs sound-mixing workshops in various contexts, including in open spaces like parks and with people battling addiction.
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