The ‘Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao has been organised in collaboration with the Norman Foster Foundation. The architect and car enthusiast curated the exhibition, and collaborated with car fanatic, Nick Mason of Pink Floyd, for the sound design of some of its galleries.
Sennheiser was invited to deliver the audio experience for the showcase.
Running between April and September this year, Motion. Autos, Art, Architecture is an epic installation that plots the history of the automobile with the evolution of modern art, celebrating the artistic dimension of the car and linking it to the parallel worlds of painting, sculpture, architecture, photography and film.

Installed into seven themed galleries, namely Beginnings, Sculptures, Popularising, Sporting, Visionaries, Americana, and Future, Foster and his co-curators from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Manuel Cirauqui and Lekha Hileman Waitoller, have brought together 38 automobiles, each an architype of the theme in terms of beauty, rarity, technical progress and a vision of the future: alongside an outstanding selection of masterworks from modern and contemporary artists and architects.

“These are extraordinarily beautiful objects, and they co-exist at an equal level with great works of art and architecture,” Foster declared to the press at the opening of the exhibition. “There’s a cultural synergy and that is against the silo mentality where we think of something as fine art and these objects as just a kind of car.”

Sennheiser was invited to partner with the exhibition, alongside other automotive industry partners, including Iberdrola, Volkswagen Group and Cadillac, due to its expertise in the automotive arena via its Ambeo Mobility division. Ambeo Mobility comprises Sennheiser’s suite of immersive audio products, which the company is actively developing for the future of in-car entertainment and communication.
One of the exhibition’s sections is a dedicated learning spaces as part of the Guggenheim Museum’s Didaktika project, which designs educational content and activities to complement its exhibitions. Musician, Nick Mason, who also owns one of the iconic cars on display, was approached to conceptualise the soundscape in this area of the exhibit, additionally to having given the sound to a contemporary racing vehicle on display in the Visionaires hall at racetrack sound levels played back immersively.

In the Didaktika galley, Mason’s concept was to present a linear timeline of the automobiles shown throughout the exhibition, selecting and recording the sound of ten engines from the most iconic and representative cars in the collection. To compose and enable the soundtrack, Nick Mason and his team at Ten Tenths selected and recorded cars in motion, and and partnered with Sennheiser to bring to life the vision of a realistic sound experience powered by immersive audio technology and expertise.
The finished piece is played along the length of the corridor that fittingly leads to the Future gallery, where worldwide schools of design and architecture are presenting their visionary automotive concepts, with the support of AIC-Automotive Intelligence Center, a European centre for the generation of value for the automotive sector to address the challenges of the 21st century.
