Confession Karaoke

Inner Spaces / The Interior Summer Workshop II (2025)

At the conclusion of the second semester of the Inner Spaces/The Interior course, the students, as a collective, select a group project to be implemented. The selection process is an essential aspect of the course, challenging students to arrive at decisions and solutions through collective and participatory processes.

The selected group proposal is approached as a typical planning problem. During the summer, the students act as professional planners and interface with firms and trades to realize their proposal, coming in contact with the regular fortunes and pitfalls of a project in implementation.

In the early fall, the completed installation is showcased in a vernissage marking the beginning of its 12 month run at the bar on the Gumpendorfer Strasse.

Confession Caraoke

If you can’t say it — type it.

Confess. Whisper. Joke. Dream.
No one knows it’s you.
Your words join the others,
descending into the room,
a living archive from above.

Confession Karaoke turns the bar into a place for anonymous exchange - a new kind of social room that invites visitors to share their inner worlds. Visitors are invited to leave confessions - small or big, serious or playful - which together form a living archive that slowly descends into the space. Each entry is fully anonymous and remains untraceable.

Through a simple digital interface, visitors can submit a confession. Once sent, the text is printed in real time on one or several of the 13 thermal printers suspended above the room and released as a strip of paper into the bar.

The installation works as a spatial mechanism. 80-metre rolls of thermal paper are mounted on the wall; pulled by the printers, each strip travels across a suspended light object. With each entry, the paper is set in motion, travelling through the installation, catching light, and acting as a soft diffuser. The confession is therefore translated not only into text, but also into movement.

As the evening unfolds, the installation gradually changes. At times, the blank paper catches and diffuses the light before it is printed; at others, the light falls like a spotlight onto the accumulated strips already carrying confessions. What begins as a distant ceiling apparatus slowly presses closer with every shared sentence.

Rather than presenting text as something to be read from an interface, Confession Karaoke gives language materiality and weight. Thermal paper - the material of receipts, ordinarily thrown away - can become something worth keeping. The anonymity of the system, and the confessions of strangers landing at the tables and around you, lower the threshold for sharing and invites not only to confess but also to have conversations. Visitors become both speaker and receiver, author and audience.Over time, the bar is reshaped by the people inside it, turning casual encounters into a temporary architecture of paper filled with intimacy, humour, vulnerability, and memory.

Outside the bar, a phone booth on the facade offers the sidewalk a second point of entry. No drink required. Passersby can pick up and listen to confessions submitted from inside — strangers overhearing the shared inner lives of other strangers. (Elias, Ömer, Erfan, Jenny, Tao)

thank you at all the extra hands that helped put this together!