Direct Media [ Sound ] is a new research facility at the Kunsthochschule Kassel dedicated to the materiality of energy fields translated into sound, luminance, and spatial conditions. A contemporary praxis investigating vibration as an aesthetic form through which energy fields become tactile experiences.

In a world shaped by acceleration, Direct Media responds to a historical juncture in which our capacity to engage beyond immediacy has progressively diminished, offering a space to experience sound as a sublime encounter with unknown psycho-physical territories.

The Department of Sound at the Kunsthochschule Kassel cultivates a space for knowledge production in which students engage with tools deeply informed by contemporary approaches. It opens new forms of inquiry that extend beyond established artistic boundaries, allowing students to explore the physical, spatial, and psychological dimensions of listening as a means of revealing otherwise imperceptible living conditions of matter.

Direct Media fosters cross-disciplinary education through which students can experience, question, and engage with energy fields as haptic encounters, without limiting their expectations to feeding the art market, working for an advertising agency, or securing representation by a private gallery.

It positions electronic media, interface design, narrative forms, nightlife, studio research, publishing, sculpture, installation, and performance as ways of engaging with the multilayered realities of contemporary culture. Unlike other areas of study, this research facility at the Kunsthochschule Kassel allows media to collide. It provides a space in which students can paint, draw, code, film, compose, edit, hack, protest, design, perform, research, write, and produce without restriction to any particular tradition.

The Department of Sound functions as a laboratory for in-site explorations of aural embodiment, spatial praxis, and biological systems research, enabling students to conceptualise and construct perceptual encounters through electronic media, digital signal processing, site-specific practices, performance, sculpture, audio-visual media, and time-based formats.

Predating the department’s foundation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel in 2020, Prof. Mario de Vega (born in Mexico City, 1979) has maintained a constantly expanding archive since 1995, archiving, documenting, and preserving a wide range of contemporary artistic practices, historical unknowns, and countercultural positions related to sound.

34121 is an archive encompassing documents relating to early avant-garde traditions, conceptual art, industrial culture, bruitism, noise, plunderphonics, microtonality, minimalism, Dada, Fluxus, musique concrète, Actionism, Echtzeitmusik, avant-jazz, ethnographic recordings, folk and traditional music, RIO, psychedelia, and underground culture. Its holdings also trace the development of punk, post-punk, glam, and related liminal scenes, alongside the histories of Black music and club culture. Taken together, the archive extends across a vast field of sonic culture, preserving connections between artistic positions, technological developments, social transformations, and forms of cultural resistance.

Direct Media works with its own software, d14spora studio. Developed as open-source software and a didactic tool, it provides a framework for investigating the complexity of energy fields through the extensive possibilities of digital audio signal processing, while exploring digital forms of sonic production.