There's a particular quality to the air inside the Kubus at ZKM Karlsruhe. The space itself seems to listen. Forty-three loudspeakers arranged in a dome configuration create what the institution calls the Klangdom – a spatial stage where sound doesn't simply emanate from a source but envelops, circulates, breathes. On April 30, 2026, this chamber will host something that resists easy categorization: SCREAMING VIBRATION, a concert that positions two experimental composers – Lila-Zoé Krauß (performing as L Twills) and Rojin Sharafi – at the intersection of mental health, ecological crisis, and the limits of human perception.
The event belongs to ZKM's TURNS ECO/EXO concert series, curated by Dr. Lea Luka Sikau. But to call it simply a concert misses what's actually being staged. This is cultural infrastructure doing what cultural infrastructure should do: making visible – or rather, audible – the tensions that policy documents and technical reports can only gesture toward.
The Architecture of Attention
Consider what the ECO/EXO framework proposes. According to ZKM's program description, the series "transforms two central tensions of our time into immersive sound spaces: our relationship with fragile ecologies (ECO) and the fascination with extraterrestrial horizons (EXO)." The language matters. Not "addresses" or "explores" – transforms. The claim is that sound can do something that discourse cannot: create collective spaces of sensory experience where eco-anxiety becomes not an individual pathology but a shared atmospheric condition.
This is not mysticism dressed in curatorial language. The Klangdom's technical architecture – its capacity for three-dimensional sound placement, its ability to move frequencies through space – creates genuine perceptual conditions that differ from conventional listening. When Sikau describes the audience being "placed at the center," she's describing a phenomenological shift. The listener becomes surrounded rather than addressed. The body becomes implicated.
For those building systems that will shape how people experience information, this matters. Interfaces always have an ideology. The Klangdom's ideology is immersion, presence, the dissolution of the boundary between observer and observed. What happens when that ideology meets content about ecological collapse and mental fragmentation?
Two Approaches to Unraveling
L Twills brings The Art of Mind, described as "a new multimedia opera" that investigates "postmodern subjectivity and agency through the history of madness in the European context." The structural lens is the operatic mad scene – that moment in classical opera where a character's psychological unraveling becomes spectacle, where the voice breaks free from narrative coherence into pure expression.
The work follows an auto-fictional character called Girl who has traveled through her mind using a computer program. Her mother, MOW (Manic Old Woman), has chosen to remain in a psychiatric ward rather than follow "a master plan prescribed by the unemployment office." The detail is precise and devastating: the collision between institutional mental health care and the bureaucratic demands of labor market participation. This is not abstract. This is the texture of contemporary European life, rendered as sonic architecture.
Krauß's approach uses "abrupt shifts, fragmented text, and expressively unbounded vocals" to dramatize psychological unraveling. But the claim is larger: that this form "becomes a vehicle for reimagining our relationship to madness and for articulating the emotional landscape of a world in crisis." The mad scene as diagnostic tool. The operatic tradition as lens for ecological fragility.
Rojin Sharafi's Sinthome operates differently. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's concept of the sinthome – "a singular knot that holds existence together" – and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva's thinking on relationality and entanglement, Sharafi creates work where "past, present, and future remain interwoven." The sonic materials include "microtonal structures, polymetric tensions, analog synthesizers, voice, live processing, and electronically transformed sound."
What emerges, according to the program notes, is a piece that "moves between harshness and fragility, density and exposure. Folkloric traces and abstract noise textures coexist without hierarchy." Sound becomes "a way of holding together heterogeneous times and affects – a knot through which fracture, memory, and persistence can be heard at once."
What Gets Naturalized
The TURNS ECO/EXO series, funded by Musikfonds e.V., explicitly prioritizes "artists with no prior experience in the Klangdom" and positions "feminist and decolonial approaches" as "a shared foundation for artistic research." This is institutional programming making choices about whose voices get amplified, whose methods get resourced, whose questions get asked.
The series has already staged EATING VOICES & SMELLING SPHERES in January, BARKING FAUNA in February, and ELECTRIC ASHES just days ago on March 27. Each concert pairs artists working with ecological themes through spatial sound. The cumulative effect is not a series of discrete events but a sustained investigation – a research program conducted through aesthetic experience rather than academic publication.
For policymakers and technologists, the question becomes: what does this kind of cultural infrastructure make possible that other forms of knowledge production cannot? The Klangdom doesn't produce data. It doesn't generate policy recommendations. It creates conditions for collective perception of phenomena that resist quantification: the feeling of ecological precarity, the texture of mental fragmentation, the experience of being held together by knots rather than foundations.
The Artifact Remembers
ZKM itself – the Zentrum für Kunst und Medien – occupies a former munitions factory in Karlsruhe. The building's history as a site of weapons production now houses research into art and technology, media and perception. This is not irony but transformation: industrial infrastructure repurposed for cultural production, the architecture of violence becoming the architecture of attention.
The institution currently hosts THE SCREEN: Three Positions on AI and Art, featuring work by Refik Anadol among others. The proximity matters. In one part of the building, visitors encounter AI-generated visual spectacle – the kind of machine aesthetics that disarms through scale and apparent objectivity. In another, the Klangdom stages encounters with human voices pushed to their expressive limits, with sound that refuses the clean geometries of computational generation.
The contrast is not opposition but dialogue. Both spaces ask what it means to perceive in an age of technological mediation. Both create conditions for attention that differ from the default modes of contemporary experience. Both treat the visitor's body as a site of knowledge production.
Listening as Responsibility
SCREAMING VIBRATION takes place on April 30, 2026, at 7:00 PM. Tickets cost €7, with free admission for anyone under 27. The accessibility of the price point is itself a statement: this is not elite cultural consumption but public infrastructure for collective experience.
The series continues in May with WOLVES AND THROATS, extending the ECO/EXO investigation into summer. Each event builds on the last, creating a cumulative archive of approaches to the present moment's central tensions.
What the Klangdom offers is not escape from ecological crisis or mental fragmentation but immersion in their textures. The space becomes a diagnostic chamber where the ambient conditions of contemporary life – the anxiety, the fragility, the sense of things coming apart – become audible, shareable, collectively held. This is what cultural institutions can do that policy frameworks cannot: create spaces where feeling becomes a form of knowledge, where the body's response to sound becomes data about the world.
The biggest shift is always what becomes normal. In the Klangdom, for two hours, a different normal becomes possible – one where listening is an act of responsibility, where sound holds together what discourse fragments, where the screaming vibration of ecological crisis finds a form that can be witnessed together.
The questions raised in Karlsruhe's Klangdom – about perception, about collective experience, about what cultural infrastructure makes possible – will find different expression at Human x AI Europe in Vienna on May 19. Different medium, similar stakes: how do the people shaping Europe's AI future create conditions for attention, for responsibility, for holding complexity together? The conversation continues.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is SCREAMING VIBRATION at ZKM?
A: SCREAMING VIBRATION is a concert event on April 30, 2026, at ZKM Karlsruhe's Klangdom, featuring experimental composers L Twills and Rojin Sharafi. It is part of the TURNS ECO/EXO series curated by Dr. Lea Luka Sikau, exploring ecological fragility and mental health through immersive spatial sound.
Q: What is the Klangdom at ZKM Karlsruhe?
A: The Klangdom is a 43-loudspeaker dome configuration inside ZKM's Kubus space that enables three-dimensional sound placement. It creates immersive listening conditions where sound envelops the audience rather than emanating from a single source, positioning listeners at the center of the sonic experience.
Q: How much do tickets cost for TURNS ECO/EXO concerts?
A: Tickets for TURNS ECO/EXO concerts cost €7, with free admission for anyone younger than 27. Tickets are available at the ZKM Information Desk, box office, and through Reservix.
Q: What is the ECO/EXO concert series about?
A: ECO/EXO is ZKM's 2026 concert series that transforms ecological fragility (ECO) and extraterrestrial perspectives (EXO) into immersive sound spaces. The series prioritizes artists without prior Klangdom experience and uses feminist and decolonial approaches as foundations for artistic research.
Q: Who are the artists performing at SCREAMING VIBRATION?
A: Lila-Zoé Krauß (L Twills) presents The Art of Mind, a multimedia opera exploring madness and mental health through operatic mad scenes. Rojin Sharafi performs Sinthome, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis to create work combining microtonal structures, noise textures, and electronically transformed sound.
Q: When and where does SCREAMING VIBRATION take place?
A: SCREAMING VIBRATION takes place on Thursday, April 30, 2026, at 7:00 PM CEST in the Kubus at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, located at Lorenzstraße 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany.