After crossing the street, I suddenly and immediately find myself in a crowd of people. Just now an evening film screening under the open sky, here in the park in front of the Vienna City Hall, has come to an end and everyone is turning to the many stands with drinks and culinary delights. The people stand very close together. There are a lot of people in a small space and everybody is talking to each other. A few more steps and I enter an acoustic speech cloud: overlays of word fragments, laughter and half sentences. The narrowness is so extreme that I move very close to the words and audible gestures of the others. I can barely move forward. I get trapped, pushed on until the next gap appears. Sometimes I understand whole sentences, but mostly just fragments. The words are very close to my ear and it's as if they were all the words in this place. All the words and at the same time; those, right next to me, those a bit further away and the sum of all the words of a moment in this place. A wonderful and impenetrable density of human pronouncements, like a carpet that rises up to a listening room of speech and communication. Behind me, in front of me and around me in every direction, this density exists. This uninterrupted variety of addition. An incomparable state is created when sliding over into this auditory phenomenon, far from any kind of content-related handholds. The concrete words echo permanently in a cloud of linguistic din. From a distance, when the direct contact to comprehensibility fades away, the entire square with all its people becomes a great auditory movement in the space of the city, far away from the acuteness of the whispering that was just close by when trying to cross it.

Vienna, August 2004