A Virtual and Contemplative Instrument for Listening to the City
Overview
PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg (2008) is the first realization of an ongoing artistic research that approaches cities as resonant living organisms. Conceived as a virtual instrument rather than a physical object, it invites participants to experience the urban environment through attentive presence, memory, and inner listening.
The project was first presented on 12 September 2008 at Gallery ParaRam (Yekaterinburg, Russia) as part of the international collective exhibition Enstruments, within the Finnish–Russian festival Together: Ecology of Space.
Physical work: photography, toned paper, collage. 1682 × 1188 mm.
PanGorMonium became the point of departure for the long-term research project Anatomy of Cities, which continues to develop through new places, new urban landscapes, and new forms of listening.
Concept
PanGorMonium does not generate sound in the conventional sense.
Its body is the city itself.
Its activation takes place through perception.
The work proposes the city as a resonant field where architecture, infrastructure, memories, absences, everyday details, and forgotten traces become components of an invisible instrument.
Each participant assembles this instrument differently.
For one person it may consist of bridges, railway stations, factories, and monuments. For another, it may emerge through a courtyard, a graffiti wall, a demolished house remembered from childhood, an old tree, a staircase, or the rhythm of daily walks.
The instrument therefore has no fixed form. It exists only in the moment of attentive encounter between a person and a place.
PanGorMonium is played not by action, but by attunement.
Listening becomes a creative act. Perception becomes performance.
The participant is simultaneously performer and listener, while the city becomes both instrument and score.
There is no external audience.
The acoustic space unfolds inwardly, where individual listening may occasionally resonate—with consonance or dissonance—with the listening of others, forming a fragile and temporary eco-orchestra.
Urban Registers
Although every city gives rise to its own unique instrument, PanGorMonium usually unfolds through multiple overlapping registers:
Cultural Register
Historic architecture, monuments, public spaces, rituals, symbols, and collective memory.
Industrial Register
Factories, transport systems, technical structures, infrastructure, construction sites, and the material metabolism of the city.
Everyday Register
Courtyards, passages, walls, handwritten notices, street vegetation, sounds, routines, and unnoticed details.
Absent Register
Demolished buildings, erased landscapes, vanished communities, forgotten names, and places that continue to exist through memory.
These registers never remain separate. They constantly overlap, producing shifting constellations of meaning that differ for every participant.
Origin of the Name
PanGorMonium is an artist-constructed word that intentionally resists literal translation.
Its internal structure combines several conceptual and linguistic associations.
Pan (Greek) suggests totality and the presence of the whole.
Hormao (Greek) evokes movement, activation, and the impulse to set something into motion.
Harmony recalls proportion, resonance, and the ancient idea of the music of the spheres.
Monos (Greek) points toward singular perception: each act of listening remains profoundly individual.
Rather than functioning as an etymological formula, these layers coexist as resonances within the title itself, reflecting the assembled and polyphonic nature of the city.
Ongoing Research
Although PanGorMonium originated in Yekaterinburg in 2008, it is conceived as an open and evolving body of work rather than a single artwork.
Each new city becomes a new instrument with its own internal acoustics, memory, materiality, and emotional geography.
Current and developing studies include:
- PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg (2008) — Industrial Resonance
- PanGorMonium: Budapest (ongoing) — Thermal Palimpsest
- Future studies in other cities are developed as independent instruments rather than repetitions of the original work.
Artistic Framework
PanGorMonium forms one of the foundational projects within the broader artistic framework Anatomy of Cities.
Across this long-term research, cities are approached not as collections of buildings but as living bodies shaped by time, memory, disappearance, and continuous transformation.
Within this practice, listening is understood as a method of artistic research.
Attention becomes a creative medium.
The work does not ask how a city looks.
It asks how a city continues to resonate within those who inhabit, remember, or encounter it.
