Free Admission
Presented in collaboration with artists and creatives, ArtScience Encounters is an invitation to discover curious spaces hidden within ArtScience Museum’s unique architecture.
About the Artist
Robert Schwarz is a Vienna-based sound artist whose practice sits at the intersection of computer music, visual art and architecture. His work explores listening as an embodied and immersive experience, often blurring the boundaries between sound synthesis and field recording to create richly textured sonic environments.
Schwarz has presented his work internationally at institutions and festivals including CTM Berlin, MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles), Kunsthalle Wien, Ars Electronica (Linz), Tokyo Arts and Space, Skaņu Mežs (Riga), Inner Spaces (Milan) and Akousma (Montreal). His recordings have been released on labels such as Superpang, ETAT, ALTER and Gruenrekorder. He is the co-founder and curator of PARKEN, a Viennese festival dedicated to adventurous music and collective listening.
6 Mar 2026, Fri
Time: 6pm – 6.45pm
Location: Oculus, Basement 2
Free Admission
This live performance by Vienna-based sound artist Robert Schwarz marks the launch of Stridulations, extending the sonic logic of the installation through a real-time activation of the Oculus. Conceived as an embodied listening experience, the performance unfolds across the architecture through layered sound and live spatialisation, inviting audiences to linger and listen within the space.
Drawing on Schwarz’s long-term research into insect communication, the performance treats stridulation as both method and metaphor: sound emerging through friction, repetition and collective synchrony. Field recordings, synthesis and live spatial control articulate shifting relationships between the individual and the swarm, the organic and the synthetic, and the programmed and the emergent.
Feb – May 2026
A micro festival of insects, machines and intelligent futures
Signal & Swarm is a micro festival that explores intelligence in all its forms — biological, digital and mechanical. Inspired by the intricate worlds of Insects: Microsculptures Magnified and NOX: Confessions of a Machine, the programme weaves together practices of care, curiosity and co-evolution to invite reflection on urban futures, machine empathy and the hidden lives of insects.