Vibraceptional Plate (2024-)
by Jan St. Werner
Sound can set matter in motion, and vice versa: vibrating matter can emit sound waves. The vibratory quality of acoustics—the physical, immediate, and direct impact of sound on bodies and objects—is the subject of the Vibraceptional Plate, a public platform for experiencing and experimenting with vibration. Visitors are invited to step on the plate and explore the resonant chamber that is their own body, listen to their voices being modulated, make scribbled drawings, or observe patterns that appear when grains are poured onto the plate. Objects can be also placed on the plate to observe their performance under seismic impact. This participatory artwork highlights the inherent instability and pulsating energy present within and around all solid matter. The tectonic nervousness of Zagreb transcends into an urgent yet playful investigation of wavespace.
Commissioned by SONCITIES, the Vibraceptional Plate serves both as a vibrating structure and a platform for investigating vibrational perception, which Jan St. Werner refers to as ‘vibraception.’ This project stems from St. Werner’s long-standing interest in sound as a spatial practice and his creation of anarchic architectures that use sound and psychoacoustic phomena to challenge traditional architectural forms. The Vibraceptional Plate extends St. Werner’s collaboration with SONCITIES in exploring the potential of vibrational architectures—those that prioritize vibrational phenomena, including audible and inaudible sound, seismic waves, and mechanical waves—to disrupt and reorient architectural thinking. Whereas traditional architecture is often associated with stability, fixity, and permanence, vibrational architectures are characterized by their instability, fluidity, dynamism, openness, and permeability. Vibration creates anarchic spatialities—forms and processes that cannot be contained, predicted, or planned. As such, vibrational architectures offer fertile ground for reimagining architectural design.
Workshops connected to the Vibraceptional Plate will be conducted by a group of local and international scholars for architecture and art students in Zagreb, who will be invited to imagine what vibrational architecture could be. These students will design new vibrational architectures, which will be shared on the SONCITIES website and in future publications. As a participatory public artwork, the Vibraceptional Plate invites anyone to create, experiment, and explore the realm of vibrations and wavespace.
The Vibraceptional Plate is being exhibited for the first time at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb, as part of the exhibition ‘Vibraception: Investigations in Wavespace,’ curated by Ana Škegro and opening on 20 September 2024. It was conceived by Jan St. Werner and built by Michael Akstaller.
Concept and design: Jan St. Werner
Engineer: Michael Akstaller
Commissioned by: SONCITIES
Curator of VIbraception exhibition: Ana Škegro
Vibrational architecture workshop conveners: Jan St. Werner, Nikola Bojić, Brett Mommersteeg, Gascia Ouzounian, Ana Škegro
Vibraception exhibition poster: Rupert Smyth
Photos and video of Vibraceptional Plate: Sanja Bistričić Srića
Acknowledgements: Ana Škegro, Nikola Bojić, Damir Gamulin, Polly Nuttgens, Diana Rodriguez, Rudy Schmidt, Olivia Thornton
Poster by Rupert Smyth
Vibraceptional Plate by Jan St. Werner at MSU Zagreb
Photo by Sanja Bistričić Srića
vibra solo ception (2024) by David Grubb
for solo guitar, Vibraceptional Plate, and two remote amplifiers
This performance was held on the occasion of the opening of Jan St. Werner’s exhibition at MSU Zagreb, on 20 September 2024. Video by Sanja Bistričić Srića.
David writes:
My task was to play solo electric guitar atop on the Vibraceptional Plate, with my output routed to one amplifier three stories above me on the roof of the museum, facing Avenija Dubrovnik, and a second guitar amplifier placed in the center of a plaza on the opposite side of the building. Starting to make sound, my first impression was that of being anesthetized, like I was playing guitar while drugged for a root canal; my hands functioned as they should, but the amplified instrument was only distantly audible, arriving from way over . . . somewhere. And indeed I was only hearing it from a considerable distance, both from the roof of the museum, and bouncing off of the bus stop or very faintly echoing from buildings across the street. […]
I thought about myself—or any performer with the Vibraceptional Plate—as a transducer, making audible the platform’s vibrations. That seems fanciful. Rather what I played was a response to what I felt when seated on the platform. It seems more apt to describe it in terms of a duo in which only one part is audible. […]
The strangest aspect of the plate’s vibrations was that I came to feel that I was hearing them. Certainly I felt the movement, but there were times when I could swear that I was listening to the plate, hearing its sounds meshed with my own. I think that was just my brain doing some small-scale but deeply pleasurable short-circuiting. I’d like to try it again with this in mind—to focus at length on the psychoacoustic sensation of hearing what I would have otherwise understood to be inaudible.
-Excerpt from ‘vibra solo ception’ by David Grubbs. Forthcoming (2025) in Jan St. Werner (ed.), Vibraception: Investigations in Wavespace. Berlin and Zagreb: K Verlag and Mama.
Vibraceptional Plate at MSU Zagreb
Jan St. Werner, Vibraception: Investigations in Wavespace (20 September 2024 - 1 May 2025)
