Long night talks is a project created by Roberto Paci Dalò during his stay in Vienna at Tonspur – Q21/ MQ Museums Quartier, in July 2017. The project is dedicated to Robert Adrian (Toronto, 1935 – Vienna, 2015), a Canadian artist known for mixing traditional media and new technologies. Long night talks is inspired by the intense and hypnotic conversations that the two artists, Roberto Paci Dalò and Robert Adrian, used to have in his Vienna’s studio. Long night talks is made of 8 audio channels and 7 images.

Visitors to the Tonspur_passage, a multi-channel audio space in the Museums Quartier of Vienna, embark on a fascinating journey in the voice of Robert Adrian.
In Long night talks, in fact, Roberto Paci Dalò works on his friend’s voice, which from primordial material explodes into a thousand instrumental vibrations and electronic oscillations.
In addition to the sound work, the artist, remembering the conversations at night, creates a series of drawings, which represent the constellations of a vast night sky. The drawings are seven in all, to symbolize the nights of an imaginary week spent with Robert Adrian in his studio in the Wiednerhauptstraße in Vienna.
The night sky is also a graphic score.

Nightly conversations with Robert Adrian

Paci Dalò’s work is dedicated to Robert Adrian (Toronto, 1935 – Vienna, 2015), an artist known for his experimental works that mix different media, from the most traditional to new technologies and telecommunications. The Canadian artist lived in Vienna until 1972 and his contribution to the world of art is shown by a significant retrospective of his successes at the Kunsthalle Wien. For more than twenty years Roberto Paci Dalò and Robert Adrian cultivated a deep friendship, working side by side in several projects, including a film specially created for the great retrospective of Adrian. The two used to sit in Adrian’s studio in Wiednerhauptstrasse and share long evening talks discussing passionately about art, radio, broadcast, technology, web, sound, war and conflict. As Roberto Paci Dalò says to “Artribune”: “Robert Adrian, together with the painter James Rosen and the composer John Cage were my main teachers. Friends, colleagues and inspirers in New York, Canada and Austria”. He adds: “I shared Long Night Talks with Adrian for over 25 years. In my travels to Vienna, I used to live in his studio in the Wiednerhauptstrasse and our endless nocturnal conversations – both sitting in front of computers – have carried me vortically into a world of art, media, technology, telecommunication systems, radio, internet. I’m not a nocturnal person, so many times I listened in a kind of sleep-wake and in the flow phrases and single words materialized at times. In my work I wanted to evoke this sensorial dreamtime”.

An installation of sounds and visions

For his sound and visual installation, the Italian sound artist mainly used a conversation with Adrian. This conversation was recorded for an exhibition that the city of Vienna dedicated to the Canadian artist at the Kunsthall Wien in 2001, a circumstance for which Paci Dalò himself made a short film. The grain of Adrian’s voice accompanies the series of seven drawings that the Italian artist has created by conceiving them as a constellation. On the day of the inauguration of Long Night Talks, the radio work of the same name, lasting almost an hour, is broadcast on Ö1 Kunstradio. This radio work is generated from the same materials as the installation, but redesigned in a radically different way.