This is a distributed sound composition that comes to life in public space when users activate it on their devices. Each device generates its own layer of sound, and near others, it merges with them into a harmonic whole. The work juxtaposes physical presence with virtual sound, alluding to the philosophical idea of Immanuel Kant – the noumenon, a thing existing independently of human perception.

“Noumen” by Paweł Janicki, from 2019

“Noumen” is an unusual musical work and a dispersed soundscape. Paweł Janicki’s interpassive installation in public space is located primarily in Wrocław’s Szczytnicki Park (specifically, in the place where the WRO team planted a young plane tree in 2019)—but it’s both everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

“Noumen” is a software miniature existing at the URL https://noumen.info – after entering the address into a web browser (preferably on a mobile device with access to geolocation enabled and necessarily with the sound turned on), the work begins generating sound events that make up a full-scale, although extended in time, musical composition, and the more devices running “Noumen” are located in close proximity to each other, the richer and more structured the sound composition emerges from the sum of synchronized sounds produced by individual devices (each device produces its own musical tissue, but all of them synchronize harmonically and in terms of tempo and meter). The nature of the sound structures produced is influenced by the distance of the device from the perceived work center (lat/lon 51.10713889/17.08055556), so traveling with devices with geolocation enabled leads to results that change as the device (and likely the person carrying it) moves.

Since its premiere in 2019, the work has been a living creation, and from time to time, it changes its perceived center and anchors itself in other geolocation points (for example, the locations of other works presented by WRO in public spaces in Wrocław, such as Martin Bricelj Baraga’s “Cyanometer: Monument to the Blueness of the Sky” at Joliot–Curie Street 12 and the “Megaphones” installation by Hannes Praks and Birgit Öigus in Wschodni Park).

In the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his followers, the noumenon (or noumenon, Greek: νοούμενoν) is a thing-in-itself, a phenomenon that, while it can be known rationally, exists and develops beyond and independently of human consciousness. For Kant, the noumenon signified a reality that exists independently of consciousness and that cannot become a “thing for us”—an absolutely knowable one.