Sonic Confession
Artist Laboratory 2025
11 August – 8 September | Torhaus Stadt Wehlen Gallery, Saxon Switzerland National Park, Germany
OUTSIDEININSIDEOUTINSIDEOUTOUTSIDEIN invites you to step into the process of Sonic Confession — a one-month laboratory dedicated to collective creation, sonic exploration, and embodied research.
Set within the unique landscape of Saxon Switzerland, the lab brought together artists to explore the relationships between sound, the natural environment, and sensory experience. Drawing from ecomusicology, participants examined how sound is shaped by ecological contexts and how it in turn shapes perception, memory, and meaning. Through field recordings, deep listening, and sonic experimentation, sound became both a method and a material.
This year’s edition built upon previous inquiries, weaving together diverse practices and perspectives — from herbalism and folklore to technology, disembodied entities, and altered states of perception. Working at the intersection of local culture and emerging artistic methodologies, the lab engaged in a collective investigation into how memory is encoded through doing, sensing, and experiencing.
While sound remained central, the laboratory intentionally embraced other modes of perception, fostering a broader dialogue on how different experiences resonate, overlap, and co-create meaning in a shared artistic environment.
Selected artists:
Barbara Miše
Junying Wu
Nefo Zhạng
Petr Nēmec
Rigoberto Gallardo
Shu Ching Chon
Guest artists, workshop facilitators
Antje Meichsner
František Hruška
Paul Tas from Error Instruments
Sabiwa
Yenting Hsu
Workshops and Sharing Practices
13.08. “Sound Cartography” workshop with Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya
How can we capture the sonic essence of a place on a map? How have approaches to sound cartography evolved over time? What defines this practice, and who were its pioneers? In this exploration of digital sound cartography, we will delve into the history and development of sound mapping, exploring the work of researchers who laid its foundations. We will discover the different forms that sound maps can take and how techniques for recording and representing soundscapes have transformed over time. Through listening sessions, we will experience the work of artists who use diverse field recording techniques, gaining insight into their methods and creative approaches.
14.08 – 15.08 building DIY experimental synth with Paul Tas
With founder and artist Paul Tas presented in collaboration with Outsideininsideoutinsideoutoiutsidein collective. Join a hands-on workshop led by Paul Tas, the visionary founder of Error Instruments—a boundary-breaking platform at the intersection of art, sound, and technology. Known for his experimental electronic instruments, Paul creates devices that invite exploration and push the edges of what music, noise, and performance can be.
This workshop offers participants the chance to build their own DIY experimental synths using specially selected kits. These instruments are designed to be built in just 2–3 hours, making them accessible for all skill levels—even beginners. Through soldering and sound exploration, you’ll not only learn how the devices are made but also how to use them expressively, whether through touch, control voltage, or sonic intuition.
What You’ll Experience:
Hands-on DIY building. Learn to solder and assemble your own instrument. Discover how to use your device in ways that are tactile, ambient, noisy, or meditative. Dive into the concepts of control voltage, modular design, and experimental performance. Engage with instruments that focus on touch and organic interaction, echoing rhythms from the natural world.
Featured DIY Kits, Selected especially for this session by Error Instruments: • Cloud Busting
• Blind Noise
• Noise Therapy
These devices are designed with a modular sensibility—some using banana patch bays—encouraging playful and unpredictable interactions, perfect for live performance or meditative sound exploration. Whether you’re an artist, musician, thinker, or just curious about sound, this workshop offers a rare opportunity to explore the Error Instruments ethos: raw, expressive,and radically open- ended.
20.09 Artistic research on landscape with the means of hiking with Antje Meichsner
Antje Meichsner is a Dresden based multidisciplinary artist in the fields of sound, film, composition, radio, graphics, poetry. In terms of content, she deals with the body in the society and which political discourses cross the individual. And how the individual crosses the landscape. Antje Meichsner has a particular focus on people who live in Saxon Switzerland. She has been conducting artistic research on this region since 2020. Antje will join the laboratory partly and will enhance our knowledge about the surroundings, landscape and listening through explorative practice of hiking trip, and sleeping outside.
“The Bodies of Water / Liquid Sound” with Katarina Kadijević & Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya
This two-day workshop invites participants to explore underwater sound using hydrophones and guided listening exercises. Together, we will investigate how sound travels through water, how it interacts with different environments, and how these sonic experiences can shift our perception of place, time, and listening itself.
Throughout the workshop, we’ll experiment with sound as a way to move beyond everyday, human-centered perception—opening space to imagine how other beings or systems might hear the world. Underwater listening becomes both a method of inquiry and a way of paying attention to often-overlooked environments.
Day 1 (Outdoors):
We begin outdoors by visiting various urban water sources—fountains, runoff areas, small streams. Participants will use hydrophones to listen closely to these sites and to how the presence of objects like ice can subtly transform the acoustic environment. We’ll gather recordings, share impressions, and reflect on how sound can help us relate differently to familiar places.
Day 2 (Thermal Bath):
On the second day, we move into a thermal bath, where warm water creates a different acoustic space—more internal, dense, and tactile. Here we’ll explore how voice and sound behave underwater, experimenting with submerged speaking, singing, and small objects. We explore how voices dissolve underwater, how listening becomes bodily, and how vibration becomes a form of communication. We’ll reflect on how sound connects us to our own bodies and to others in shared aquatic space. The workshop concludes with a recursive, guided listening meditation—folding time, space, and body into a shared sonic reflection.
“Screaming workshop, performative practices” with Hayden Potter We will explore the body’s loudest registers— listening to how each space reshapes the scream. From courtyards to riverbanks, we test how terrain, echo, and distance transform collective vocal release. |
“A Sound Fiction” with Yenting Hsu
A collaborative storytelling through sound
Let’s begin with a sound. Each participant is invited to respond to this sound — the response can take any form: a memory, a story, a sentence, another sound, a movement, a drawing, or anything that comes to mind.
Then, another participant responds to the previous response, creating a chain of reactions — like a game of “consequences” or “word chain”, but built from sound and imagination.
Once the chain is complete, each participant will receive the entire materials of responses and is invited to play with it freely. One can rearrange, reinterpret, add new layers, or mix in your own materials — shaping your own version of a sound fiction. It can take any form: an audio piece, a text, a drawing, a short performance, or something in between.
At the end of the workshop, everyone will share their stories, revealing how a single sound can unfold into many different worlds.
This workshop invites participants to open their imagination and explore storytelling beyond words.
3.09 – 04.09.2025 WHO LOVES THE SUN: DIY Electronics introduction & building an environmental synth with František Hruška, assisted by Andrejs Poikāns
The Czech sound artist František Hruška will visit the laboratory to give a workshop introducing low-cost DIY techniques to building simple circuits for electronic sound synthesis and filtering. He will be focusing on building bear-bone oscillators using arduino chips and bread-boards and delving further into the use of sensors (light, temperature, movement) to create devices that can interact with the environment around them. The strategy is guided towards building non-linear and interactive electronic systems, which aesthetically embrace faults and glitches, at the same time resisting the technological illiteracy that the corporate electronics producers embed in their design of un-fixable devices.
Discover what traditional education left out in this immersive, beginner-friendly workshop. You’ll gain practical, hands-on experience with the fundamentals of electronics—from reading and drawing basic circuits to understanding and applying essential analog components and soldering.
Step by step, you’ll learn to solder and build your own synthesizer as well as understanding how it works and how to use the knowledge in your future projects. This unique device is powered by solar energy and responds to real-time environmental data—temperature, humidity, wind, and light—transforming weather conditions into sound. Housed in a case made from recycled materials, your creation becomes a personal and expressive “sonic weapon” that reflects today’s urgent climate crisis.
No prior knowledge required. Just curiosity, creativity, and a touch of rebellious spirit.
In partnership with dear friends, supporters the C. Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts in Dresden.
The project is supported by the Czech-German Fund for the Future, NETZWERK | MEDIEN | KUNST Dresden, the C. Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts, Torhaus Wehlen Gallery and the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf Cultural Advisory Board, Berlin.