Choir of Kin – Photosynthesizer

Central to the installation at DAS WEISSE HAUS is the Photosynthesizer, making its Austrian debut. The instrument is part of the project Choir of Kin by the collective Transformative Narratives, consisting of Lena Kuzmich and Tony Wagner, and emerged from one and a half years of transdisciplinary research in collaboration with the University of Cambridge and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Developed by Lena Kuzmich, the Photosynthesizer translates the photosynthetic activity of living cyanobacteria and microalgae into a light-responsive soundscape. The organisms respond continuously to changes in light, temperature, and other environmental factors, making otherwise invisible biological processes audible and perceptible in their interconnectedness.

By harnessing the algae’s bioelectrical activity, the work explores a new, eco-centric approach to music-making: humans, organisms, and the environment are not separate, but form an inseparable, dynamic network. Every action, biological process, and acoustic response is part of this network, making our responsibility for ecological relationships tangible.

In three performative sequences, performers interact with the Photosynthesizer through experimental music pieces composed specifically by Tony Wagner. The compositions create a shared listening space in which the instrument’s signals and the live sounds of the performers merge. Through their intuitive and improvisational responses within the compositions, a vibrant, interconnected resonance emerges – a Choir of Kin.

Live Activation I
with Susanna Gartmayer, Karolina Preuschl, and Tony Wagner 
April 16, 2026

Live Activation II  
with Li-Chin Li and Tony Wagner 
April 28, 2026

Live Activation III   
with Margit Schoberleitner, Hannah Todt, and Tony Wagner 
Mai 08, 2026

Choir of Kin (2024)

Transformative Narratives (Lena Kuzmich, Tony Wagner & Guests)

In Choir of Kin, the collective Transformative Narratives invites the audience to partake in an immersive audiovisual experience. The installation, together with a performance that commences from March 14-16th during the Imagetanz festival at brut nordwest, see the voices of various life forms merge in a fictional habitat. Explorative sounds reverberating in this intricate scenery cherish the get-together of human and non-human collaborators in a multi-species affair. 

The piece roots in the collective’s inquiries into symbiosis, entanglement of landscapes, and sympoietic world-building. Queer understandings of kinship are applied to research in ecology, biology, and music theory. Practices of active listening and engagement with beyond-human agencies form crucial methodologies.

Sonic and textual interventions by the human performers meet sound creations generated from data by non-human life. Inhabiting the Grey Space at brut, the artists form a choir with the scenery they sonically interact with. This Choir of Kin acts as a resilient yet dissonant defense system for dealing with environmental and generational trauma.

Choir of Kin – Lichenography (2023)

Transformative Narratives (Tony Wagner & Lena Kuzmich)

Choir of Kin is an ongoing multipart, cross-media project by the collective Transformative Narratives, exploring experimental music notation and sound production processes through multispecies encounter. The collective's themes and methodologies are shaped by its inquiries into symbiosis, landscape entanglement, and sympoietic world-building. At Silent Green, the collective presents its music notation technique, Lichenography.

Lichenography is a custom music notation method that generates sounds based on the morphological data of lichen. The bodily shapes of lichens growing on trees and stones are manually traced and translated into MIDI notes using digital music editing software. Generating tone clusters, the lichens become active participants in the composition process.

The animated visualizer makes the audible visible: as a thin line traces the shapes of the lichen, notes are triggered, and sound is produced. The audience is invited to watch and listen as a symphony unfolds.

The project’s development was supported by the European Media Art Plattform within the framework of a research residency at Antre Peaux in Bourges, France.

Chromatic Circles (2026)

Chromatic Circles was presented as Tony Wagner's final work at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna on January 15th 2026 at the Academy's Prospekthof in Vienna.

The subject of Chromatic Circles – Cycle 1 is a sonic topography, drawn through the systematic and chromatic shifting of four cello voices, unfolding a dense fabric of harmonies, dissonances and floating overtones. The four voices build clusters, rise and fall in half-step increments, cross and intertwine, and ultimately return to the starting points of the other voices.

A graphic score was developed specifically for this piece. Its system consists of four concentric circles, each made up of the five staff lines of classical musical notation. The notes orbit like planets around an imaginary center, rising and falling in half-step increments. The score is designed so that the composition can potentially be played infinitely and to be read and deciphered like a map of land or stars.

The focus of the performance and the live sound is the exploration of a collective, site-specific Deep Listening, in which the architectural resonance space is understood as an integral, co-composing actor.

The space chosen is utilized in this work for its natural reverberation and unique acoustics. Audience, performers, and space together form a collective Listening Entity.

BOGLAND binds together solo and ensemble pieces by musician and artist Tony Wagner. Breaching the shores of new classical, ambient and drone, Bogland builds immersive ambiences for introspection and rest. It’s sleepy music that connects to the bogs’ unsteady, slowly moving, palpable but ephemeral components. Bogland’s live listening session Sound piece for five cellos premiered within SYNTHESES at the circular space of das weisse haus on January 27th 2024.

Exploration of four strings (2023)

Viennese label Jeopardize is a low-key umbrella for a wide variety of styles and low-threshold approaches. Its second instalment “VARIOUS ARTISTS 2” gathers takes on ambient, noise and drone music.

Bogland’s “Exploration of four strings” and emme’s “lucidity” further set the tone for VA2 as a split-premiere on Tender Matter. Both of the introspective pieces present their own venturous spacings and soundscapes.

The full compilation is out on the 6th of June 2024 and will be presented in Vienna at FLUCC Deck in collaboration with “Enigmatic Serenades”.

Clusterfuck (2025)

Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner

“On Saturday, June 14, 2025, Toni Schmale’s sculpture Schmale Flasche will be supplemented by an intervention conceived by Wally Salner and entitled Clusterfuck Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner. The site will be the surroundings of a one-person tent placed in the space between the Schmale Bottle and Mahler’s historic hut like a temporary fold. What will unfold is a twenty-minute sound dialogue: an electric violin, connected to effect units, will meet the metal sculpture and the acoustics of the forest—technology and nature, resonance and interference will be negotiated in real time.

Tony Wagner’s performance understands listening as a pro-active practice of establishing a relationship: sounds are not only produced, but they can also be experienced as relations between body, material, space, and surroundings. The audience is invited to inscribe itself in this field of action—not only as passive listeners but also as participants in a process in which the lines between inside and outside, between work of art and environment are redrawn and shifted time and again.

In the sense of 2025’s Mahler Forum theme The Sound of Listening, listening becomes a political and aesthetic gesture here: it means to become aware of what takes place between things, on the fringes, on the thresholds. The performance allows us to experience that listening is not only perception, but also relation—a form of orientation in a space whose topology constantly shifts. In this way, Clusterfuck Experimental Sound Performance for Electric Violin by Tony Wagner with Schmale Bottle in an Afterhour Setting by Wally Salner becomes the soundtrack of a place where mathematics, sculpture, history, and the present, human and non-human enter into a shared and open field of listening.”

Clusterfist (2025)

Soundperformance for solo violin at Ve.Sch Kunstverein

Clustertract / Luxxx (2026)

Wotruba Church is this year's venue for the Unsafe+Sounds' opening event. In addition to previously announced acts, a site-specific commissioned work will also receive its world premiere. "Clustertract / Luxxx" by Tony Wagner explores the physical and emotional boundaries of the violin. The composition combines cultural-historical reflection – the violin as an instrument of secular community and collective transgression – with a contemporary perspective on collective experiences of loss. The composer, producer, and musician moves between Minimal Music and Dark Ambient, between academic engagement and underground spirit, thus connecting with legacy acts such as Pauline Oliveros and Tony Conrad.

XxA (2022)

Transformative Narratives (Lena Kuzmich & Tony Wagner)

XxA marks a quest into the underworld, the chaotic breeding grounds where selves are sculpted and  identities moulded. It traces a place where friendship is magic, radical care a transformative force, and where hybrid bodies spawn queer joy. 

With social expectations and personal stories of love, loss, pain ever-present, navigating this ambiguous world raises questions of being and becoming.

In XxA, where neither characters nor landscapes are ever fixed, we witness eternal metamorphosis. Is change this sore and tender planet’s only constant? Do we find ourselves within a spectrum where alleged opposites merge? 

Suspírame Lira (Original Score) by Tony Wagner (2024)

Dir. Veza Fernández

Suspírame Lira is a performance by Veza Fernández that was premiered in October 2024 at Tanzquartier Wien with a revival in February 2026.

Veza Fernández’ group piece with live music by Tony Wagner is anatomical theater of a different kind. Sensuous and rebellious, Suspírame Lira reveals what lies within and stages what a multifarious physicality might look like.

Veza Fernández’ uniquely expressive and emotive performances develop from a feeling in her guts and get deep under the audience’s skin. Her group piece, which premiered at Tanzquartier Wien in 2024, is an anatomical theater of a somewhat different kind: an opening up of bodies, but without a scalpel. A contemplation of what lies within, without a categorizing and separating gaze. Fernández travels far back in medical history for this investigation, to a time when the human body was still associated with fantastic, miraculous notions and perceptions, and before the image of the body as being made up of individual parts established itself as the sole central approach in an essentialist understanding of the body. With five dancers and live music by Tony Wagner, Suspírame Lira dreams what a staging of what lies within might accomplish. Fernández fabulates a multifarious physicality that is both sensuous and rebellious, and can neither be limited nor defined by a layer of skin. That breathes, radiates, permeates, echoes, touches. 

B-MOVIES (2024)

Dir. Carolina Cappelli

Carolina Cappelli invites audiences to the first presentation of B-MOVIES, a work-in-progress film about female secondary characters and their position within the cinematic frame. Starting with the showing of some key scenes from the movie, the artist guides you through the making of the film, reflecting on the ontology of the medium and the way gender operates within the film genre. We can for sure say that the film takes an unexpected outcome…

As I laid down my heart and discovered the depths of my lungs (2024)

Dir. Sascha Anna Schall & Hannah Wimmer

Dancing the line between laughter and sorrow, love and rage, the characters embrace both the beauty and the raw edges of what it means to care for each other.

“I care for you
not always for myself 
I am a care body 
I care care care
I have always carried care
will always carry care 
I am a care body”

laughing at each other’s vulnerabilities and strengths, the rotation of the ribcage, where the heart is in the middle, lungs following and expanding. Essential elements of life that operate in unison yet often struggle against each other.

Through their dynamic foreplay, friends become lovers, and lovers become something even more profound. Diving into the pulse of punk and the messy celebration of embodied clownesque resistance. 

This is a performance for anyone who has ever felt the push and pull of being in connection with (an)other.This is a night for those who dare to feel deeply, enjoy a good slap, still cling to teenage fantasies and embrace to be “the fool”.

FEMINISM WTF (2023)

Dir. Katharina Mückstein

Feminism WTF is a 2023 Austrian documentary film about feminism and gender equality, written, produced and directed by Katharina Mückstein. The documentary had its world premiere at the CPH:DOX Festival in Copenhagen on 18 March 2023. It won the Audience Award for Most Popular Film at the 2023 Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film, and the Vienna Women's Prize for Best Director in 2023. The film was released theatrically in Austria by Stadtkino Filmverleih on 31 March 2023 and became the fourth most-watched Austrian film of 2023.

Tender Matter

Tender Matter is a record label founded in Vienna in 2019 by Tony Wagner and Melissa Antunes de Menezes. It focuses on queer and gender nonconforming artists working in the realms of explorative music, sound-based performance, sound installation and sound art. Tender Matter is hosting a diverse array of Vienna's experimental music and performance community as well as international guest artists. The platform's primary goal is to collaborate with like-minded collectives, communities and institutions to continually enhance multiplicity in music and performance lineups.

Snake Boots

The duo Snake Boots, the venturous collaboration between artists Karolina Preuschl and Tony Wagner, bound as chosen kin since childhood, defies categorization with its genre-fluid soundscapes. Fusing the raw pulse of analogue synths with the haunting resonance of synthesized violin, their music is an assemblage of multi-layered vocals, spoken text, and dissonant harmonics. Drawing from psychedelic romantics and the unpredictability of avant-garde noise, their compositions shatter conventional structures, leaving shards of cryptic lyrics for listeners to piece together.