Questioning entrance exams

A fence. Photo: Simon Wagner.

Questioning entrance exams

End of September is the time of the entrance exams for those who want to study in the field of art, in spite of Beuys. Therefore, I was interested in knowing what the applicants were thinking about being obliged to go through that kind of examining procedure.

The result was a sound installation, realized on Sept. 29 and 30 in the entrance hall of the Atelierhaus of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna - the place where the exams of that year took place for that institution. The sound-file itself is a montage from short interviews with applicants as well as Academy-staff, recorded during the first two days of the exams. It was important for me to present the installation already during the last day of the exams, when the decisions took place and were made public - thus having the effect of a kind of acoustic real-time reflection on what was happening.

The questions asked in the interviews where of the following type:

• Do you think that entrance exams for artistic studies are necessary and that they make sense?
• In his time as professor at the Academy of Düsseldorf, Joseph Beuys did accept all students that were applying, and finally participated at an occupation of the rector's office organized by students that had been refused. What is your opinion towards that? Given that you became a professor, would you act in the same way?
• Some people report having feelings of outrageous competition or pressure in connection with the exams. What are your experiences? Do you think that competition is an important factor in comtemporary art?

The sound-file prepared for the installation is provided here by means of Marc Reichelt's EMFF-Musicplayer or you can download it as ogg-Vorbis file:

  "Acoustic reflections"—sound-installation by Simon Wagner

You can play back ogg-vorbis compressed audio files e.g. with the VLC Media Player (also for Win or Mac). I would like to mention that this is the first of my projects that had been realized using exclusively free and open-sourced software (actually, I worked on a Gentoo-Linux machine, using audacity for cutting and editing). Finally, I would like to thank all the people who gave me an interview.