Kirsten Reese
Sound Cards Continued
audiovisual installation

Since 2005, Kirsten Reese collects postcards while traveling and registers the respective location in audio recordings. She searches in particular for places of which postcards exist, and which at the same time feature characteristic soundscapes. The postcards and field recordings come from many countries and the collection is continuously expanding. Relations between the cards are constantly changing, cultural similarities and specificities appear, often surprising. There are now more than eighty postcards that are presented to visitors as an interactive image-sound installation. With a live camera, the cards can be “surveyed”: the pictures are enlarged, inconspicuous details emerge and blur again; the sounds are filtered, switching between transformed sound and real soundscape. 

The Sound Cards project refers in two ways to the theme of “memory”. Postcards themselves are media that stand for memories – memories of travel to supposedly particularly worthwhile places in other cities and countries. They are a standardized form of memory, personal and impersonal at the same time. The photos on the cards – their motifs actually standing for landmarks that never change – are often already slightly outdated, shifted in time. In times of Instagram and Co., the medium itself is already nostalgic, historical. And will travel itself, our privilege in rich consumer societies, in the wake of the climate crisis will in future be only a memory?  

Postcards, projection, interactive camera and sound
Software programming: Kirsten Reese and Georg Klein