Matthew Ritchie with Aranda\Lasch – The Morning Line
June 7, 2011–2012 | Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna

The Morning Line is an interdisciplinary platform where artists, architects, engineers, physicists, sound designers and musicians each contribute their own specialized information to create a new form: a mutable structure, with multiple expressions and narratives intertwining in its physical structure, projected video and innovative spatialized sound environments. Artist Matthew Ritchie teamed up with design innovators Aranda/Lasch, the Music Research Centre of York University and Arup AGU to create the next leap in a fully programmable three-dimensional sound space. Based on advances in research on quasi-crystalline structures, parametric design and fractalized construction units, The Morning Line is a fully scalable space; its innovative structure can adopt every configuration, it is transportable from site to site and acts as a performance space.  

THE MORNING LINE – An Interdisciplinary Pavilion Project 
The Morning Line – an imposing 10 meter high and 20 meter long pavilion, built of 20 tons of black coated aluminum cut into drawings of our ever expanding universe – was developed during a 3-year research period and is challenging architectural convention: The team of collaborators has designed the first semasiographic building, a non-linear architectural language, based on fractal geometry and parametric design that directly expresses its content through its visual and sonic structure.   

Sound Architecture 
Beyond its architectural configuration, the artist conceived of the pavilion’s sonic identity. The Morning Line is equipped with fifty speakers, controlled by an advanced multispatial audio system, designed by the Music Research Centre of York University. As a result, the scope of the structure itself and its novel spatialization software support a new form of electronic sound composition – fully three-dimensional sound written for and performed in this new acoustic space. TBA21 has invited an international group of composers whose work lies beyond the boundaries and the programming of traditional concert halls or music clubs for that matter, to open up this forum to experimentation with different approaches.  

THE MORNING LINE Sound Festival and Symposium  
As The Morning Line is conceived as a platform for contemporary music, and within its mandate to encourage and support the production of innovative composition, TBA21 has appointed the internationally renowned, Austrian musician and sound artist Franz Pomassl to act as a guest curator for the project’s presentation in Vienna. New sonic works by Alexej Borisov (Russia), Christian Fennesz (Austria), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (Finland),  Carsten Nicolai (Germany), Zsolt Olejnik (Hungary), Finnbogi Pétursson (Iceland), Terre Thaemlitz (USA), Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Franz Pomassl himself were premiered in context of the Festival for Spatial Sound and Adcanced Music Composition at Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna. They supplement the existing archive of music and soundscapes selected by guest curators Florian Hecker, Bryce Dessner, Russell Haswell and ITU-MIAM/Istanbul, and were replayed in The Morning Line throughout the exhibition period. These include collaborative works by Bryce Dessner, David Sheppard with Evan Ziporyn, Mark Fell with Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, and solo compositions by Batuhan Bozkurt, Cevdet Erek, Ghostigital, Bruce Gilbert, Carl Michael von Hauswolff, Florian Hecker, Erdem Helvacioglu, Jónsi & Alex, Mehmet Can Özer, Lee Ranaldo, Yasunao Tone, Chris Watson, Thom Willems, Jana Winderen and Peter Zinovieff.