Profile

Sonic Thinker, Composer, Sound Artist

Born 1956 in Linz (Austria) lives and works in Berlin (Germany) since 1997.

Together with Bruce Odland he founded the collaboration O+A in 1989, exploring the central theme of “hearing perspective”. Their work is known for large scale, public space sound installations that transform city noise into harmony in real-time. 2009 O+A started on the “Sonic Commons” questioning the dominance of the visual culture in our perception of the world (www.o-a.info). Besides his longtime artistic collaboration with Bruce Odland he is a founding member of “stadtmusik”, a collaboration between the Berlin-based composers Sam Auinger and Hannes Strobl with the media artist and urbanist Dietmar Offenhuber (www.stadtmusik.org).

Sam Auinger is collaborating with city planners and architects, giving lectures and is a frequent participant of international symposiums on the topic of urban planning, architecture, media, and the senses. He was a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, running the Experimental Sounddesign department at the Sound Studies Master Program from 2008 till 2012 and associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 2013 till 2015.

Over the years Sam Auinger has received numerous prizes and awards for his work. Most recently he received the Kultur Preis der Stadt Linz (2002) to honor his body of work, the Berlin Artist-in-Residence DAAD fellowship (1997) and the SKE Publicity Prize 2007. In 2009 he was a scholarship holder of the atelier Berlin at Cité International des Arts in Paris.

In 2010 he was researching the former federal capital Bonn as “city sound artist Bonn 2010”, an award given for the first time (www.bonnhoeren.de). In 2011 he was featured artist at the Austrian Ars Electronica Festival.