Simone Aaberg Kærn,
CROSSING LINE. Fragments from a micro global performance (2002/2003)

The boundaries between the crisis regions of Afghanistan and Iran, which are militarily patrolled, are the starting point for the unusual and probably unique project realized by the Danish artist and pilot Simone Aaberg Kærn (born in 1969, Copenhagen) to call to mind the freedom of airspace, which is occupied by and whose possession is claimed by the holders of political power. Only shortly after she had earned her pilot’s license for sport planes, she realized the project, planned years earlier, of breaking through the boundaries of political and mental territories in the medium of artistic freedom. To explore rivers, roads, and valleys from the air with only a map in hand seemed especially daring after September 11, 2001. The art project 1001 Nights 2002 arose from the romantic idea of the freedom of the skies against a political background. Ten years earlier, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz had presented the sketch of their Space Power Theory, in which they elucidated the advantages of dominating airspace for controlling all activities on the ground. The key concept of the American idea is to dominate the entire spectrum; the art project, realized in the cultural-historical region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, stands against this. A sport plane, a small 41-year-old Piper Colt equipped with a 108-horsepower engine, flew through a crisis region where humanity learned to read and write, the cradle of the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religions. It was all possible only through the daring help of courageous military personnel who saw no threat in this mission and acted in contradiction to their policy of answering any unapproved penetration with fire. The documentation bears the title: CROSSING LINE. Fragments from a micro global performance.

Peter Ablinger
Hearing is the work. Chairs, bamboo, the course of the sun from its rising to its setting create a line in an open field in Rümlingen, Switzerland, on which 36 chairs and 6 bamboo plants are set up. The viewing and listening axes are lined up along the course, the angle of the sunbeams. Chairs in the landscape become a component of a larger sculpture that combines motifs of Land Art with those of conceptual compositions. Hearing and observing, orienting these two important senses in nature: this motif is found in different variants in the work of the composer and experimental sound artist Peter Ablinger (born in 1959 in Austria) when the aim is to extract aesthetic qualities from the sounds of nature in the landscape. The more unspecific the sound configuration is, the greater seems the challenge to get to the bottom of it. This is particularly clear in Ablinger’s musical works, which are devoted to the phenomena of white noise.

Auinger/Odland
For more than 15 years, the artist collective A+O has been researching acoustic situations of sites and their symbolic meanings. Live soundscapes of urban exteriors are recorded with specially developed directional microphones and processed as artistic material. Acoustic expansions that stand for the tones and noises of industrial societies in the early 21st century are staged on the surfaces of striking landscapes like desert regions and stretches. A+O develop site-specific installations in the contrast between ecology and acoustic design. Processing the soundscapes with digital filters and matrix mixers, A+O extract an unsuspected beauty from sounds and tones. Levels are increased and frequency ranges modified, tonal relations shifted. The acoustic material is made clear as a filigree network; overtone-rich lines arise that sometimes seem like liturgical singing. When finally the mighty sounds of big motors, of sirens in the canyons between tall buildings, or pointlike signals resound in nuanced timbre shifts, arrangements are carried out that quote compositional models and forms. In the musical world of Auinger and Odland, the sounds surrounding us are acoustic forms of a gigantic orchestra in whose language lies a different poetry than in traditional orchestral works. Thus, the acoustic material from Requiem for Fossil Fuels, which was performed for several days in the Sophienkirche in the framework of Interventionen 2002 in Berlin, comes from their alphabet of sounds, a collection of recorded sounds oriented toward listening perspectives and a culture of sounds in which we live. Genre titles and the course of the work point symbolically to traditions of the requiem, whose musical characteristics A+O have realized down to the individual passages. In the form of a sound installation in the Sophienkirche, spatial concepts are realized that give Requiem for Fossil Fuels an added dimension. The idea of the requiem is motivated by an artistic prognosis, namely that the beauty of vehicles driven by fossil fuels, and with them the sound of large-volume V8 motors, will vanish forever from our world in a few decades. Dinosaurs become fossils. This is why a view of a modern desert – outfitted in the depiction with fences, telephone lines, and the road – stands as a religious image at the beginning.

Jens Brand
Jens Brand’s installations make use of an extensive media material that creates stages and spaces for projections. Brand stages situations that start out from familiar images. His observations and perception are concerned with surfaces and their specific reflections. A mine in the classroom: pupils become mine guides below ground. Almost 10 years ago, Brand and the 7a class of the Hansa Gymnasium in Cologne created a sound installation out of 200 tables that were arranged like a plateau and explicitly conceived to be walked on. Small loudspeakers arranged under the tables reproduced sounds recorded in the schoolyard. Outfitted with helmets and protective clothing, the pupils led tours under the tables. In other works, film images are quoted when camera shots with still images are used for a longer period of time. Visual and acoustic events are taken directly from reality, becoming thematic as overlaying surfaces. The music video HUM, Westf., the rather random humming and ringing of a transformer station in the less accessible area of Dortmund’s inland port is the starting point for the resounding exterior monument. Or in the video sculpture Stille-Landschaft (Stillness Landscape), we experience a hand-camera panning 360° to show the Makgadigadi Pans, a salt desert in northern Botswana. The line of the horizon, trances in the sand, and the stationary microphone determine the image. The artist demands a specially designed, soundproof room in order to bring his audience to as real a perception in extreme landscape as possible.

George Brecht
George Brecht, born in 1926, initially worked as a scientist for the pharmaceutical industry. From 1958 to 1959, he studied under John Cage at the New School and took part in numerous activities and performances. He developed his artistic oeuvre, which consists almost entirely of instructions for activities and displays various elements of games and play. Parallels to simple dice and card games become an artistic handwriting that develops in parallel to procedures invented by John Cage. As early as 1957, the scientist wrote an essay dealing with the logic of artistic processes. In the piece Chance-Imagery, which was presented as a typescript in 1957 and published under the title Great Bear Pamphlet in 1966, laws of probability are examined in accordance with statistical patterns and applied to art and music. The focus thereby is on issues of artistic creativity and random operations. Art as play, the work in a small format. Instructions in the form of cards, some of them hardly bigger than a few square centimeters, little letters in envelopes, playing cards in standard sizes with drawings and instructions for action: They all bring sequences and activities of everyday life into a ritual form; small signs, puzzles, and sets that quote games of manual dexterity undermine the familiar formats of art. Brecht’s artistic oeuvre consists of numerous variants of such dramaturgies. George Maciunas first published the “chance” cards as a collection under the title Water Yam in 1962 in Wiesbaden and New York. An expanded version with 102 cards appeared in the Edition Lebeer Hossmann in Brussels and Hamburg.

John Cage
John Cage, born in 1912 in Los Angeles, lived in New York until he died in 1992. He studied architecture, Indian philosophy, Zen Buddhism, piano, and composition. Among his teachers were Adolphe Weiss, Henry Cowell, and Arnold Schönberg. His extensive experimental oeuvre is related to essential techniques of the early 20th-century avant-garde and, in the area of music, displays the influences of Erik Satie, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives. There are also influences from transcendentalist nature philosophies. László Moholy Nagy gave him an appointment at the Chicago School of Design in 1941; in 1948 he taught at Black Mountain College. He says his understanding of musical phenomena cannot be captured in the customary concepts of musical works. The Future of Music contains a plea to integrate noises taken from everyday life as compositional material. Music is everywhere. Attention to the activity of tones is the focus of a new hearing. Cage expanded sound material in the series Imaginary Landscape No.1-No.5, composed between 1939 and 1952, by recording of record players, frequency generators, and radios. In 1952, he wrote Water Music for one pianist, who operates a radio and uses whistles and water vessels as sound material. In 1971, he published SIXTY-TWO-MESOSTICS RE MERCE CUNNINGHAM for amplified solo voice. This was a sound poetry score that employed as its starting point chance processes of the I Ching to select words from Changes: Notes on Choreography by Merce Cunningham and 32 other books from his friend’s library.

Philip Corner
Philip Corner, born in 1933 in New York, was a pupil of Oliver Messiaen. His works reflect essential developments of the 1960s and 1970s. His work consists of graphic and gesticular notations. These were often assembled as large posters and often contain instructions with spiritual components. Corner became known with his exhibition with drawings and a performance, which was held for several days in the New York avant-garde institution The Kitchen and documented by the author and composer Tom Johnson. These are works that draw tones from existing objects with heavy blows. Corner uses metal plates and, in particular, large bells that produce space-filling sounds; he terms this “documentary music”, as in the composition The Barcelona Cathedral. It contains aspects of nature philosophy, Fluxus, Minimal Art, and Concept Art, as well as motifs from Zen philosophy. In 1983 he wrote The Daily Gamelan Orchestra, a composition for natural and produced sound objects. Resonating containers, like bowls, vessels, and flowerpots, were hung on a line between the trees on the shore of Lietzensee, near Berlin’s Galerie Giannozzo. The invitation card requested that the listeners bring objects that produce sound. The arrangement proceeded in accordance with the respective height of the sound, resulting in a kind of random sequence of tones reminiscent of the simple percussion instruments of primitive tribes. On the early summer evening of June 25, 1983, Philip Corner and another musician beat each object a number of times, in accordance with its position in the tone sequence. Especially interesting conceptually is his procedure of quoting musical models. Thus, in 1985, Corner worked with graphic originals and sonagrams that the artist K.P. Brehmer had made from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, producing the piano pieces: Pictures of Pictures from Pictures of Pictures.

Arnold Dreyblatt
This musician, composer, and visual artist was born in New York in 1953. Works based on numerical series calculated from simple and complicated mathematical formulas were the compositional material at the beginning of his artistic work. Sequences of frequencies and modes were initially the material for musical and visual compositions. After a short study of literature, Dreyblatt studied under Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, and John Cage. Between 1975 and 1977, he was the assistant of La Monte Young, Shigko Kubato, and Nam June Paik. Beats, his first room piece, created in 1975, took the form of a multi-channel sinus wave installation. He made electronic stroboscope films under the influence of the Minimalist Tony Conrad. Numerous concerts, performances, and compositions for stage have characterized his interests since the early 1990s, now increasingly integrating archive materials, which also flow into his performances with long readings. At the center of his work since then has been collective and individual memory, consisting, in the sculpture Wunderblock, of a monitor recessed into a table. Sequences of script leave their straight traces, appearing out of the depths of the black monitor; then their luminosity extinguishes. The present and memory have psychological and social dimensions. Reading, written characters, and traces of the past appear as flowing forms and are snapshots out of time. They emerge like sudden flashes and disappear again. If such signs are staged, reading them aloud gives them an individual coloration. Dreyblatt’s monumental Reading Projects make use of the formal settings of government offices; visitors become readers, speakers reading, in their own voices, the data sets published in Who is Who in Central & East Europe 1933 A Hypertext Opera 1991-1997. Letters and words are thereby encoded sets of data that take on their meaning and their point by accessing personal data. In his current installation, Innocent Questions, designed for the exterior façade of the Villa Grande, HL Senteret in Oslo, Dreyblatt researches the hardly known connections between the Holocaust in Norway and other genocides of the 20th century. Industrial states discriminate against foreigners and other minorities in contemporary societies through the use of systems registering their population. The origins of such personal scannings lie in punch cards used in the late 19th century to register hours worked. Personal data become interfaces between the individual and the state; the artist analyzes them in their historical development.

Frauke Eckhardt
Frauke Eckhardt, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1968, was trained as a stone sculptress. She then studied art at the Nuremberg Academy of Visual Arts and audiovisual art in Saarbrücken. Between 1997 and 1999, she was a master student under Christine Kubisch. In recent years she has presented a number of projects. In 1998, she realized her first permanent installation, Moment, in Berlin. Various support prizes and invitations to take part in group exhibitions in Ystad, Grimma, Höfgen, Luxenburg, and other cities followed. Eckhardt’s mobile works are in the recent tradition of artistic investigations that explore surfaces in public spaces using self-made instruments. As an acoustic impulse provider, they use the existing material of surfaces to create dramaturgies. RaumKlang Rezeptoren (2001, SpaceSound Receptors) is what Eckhardt calls a group of three instruments for investigating the sounds of walls. They consist of simple materials like bamboo pens arranged in groups and made to vibrate and funnels that give built-in microphones a directional character. Acoustic perspectives and movements can be produced with this. In 1999, she created the Klangmobil (sound-mobile), an instrument for exploring public space: a passerby half-lies down in it and an Interpreten (interpreter) moves it forward while microphones pick up sounds from the surfaces, which are conveyed in amplified form to the ear of the relaxing listener. In this way, surfaces can be experienced at leisure.

Ulrich Eller
Ulrich Eller, born in 1953 in Leverkusen, is now a professor at the College of Art in Braunschweig. He shaped the first-generation development of Sound Art comprehensively and diversely. His inscriptions on surfaces unfold in the media of drawing and sculpture. They create resonances inspired by the drawing oeuvre, which are then acoustically reflected. Reflection and resonance determine each other, intellectually and physically. Drawings in chalk, charcoal, and colored pencil on paper, stone walls, plaster, and glass quote musical procedures. Material is played upon. Acoustic sculptures arise out of processes of scanning, sanding, and beating. Figures grow that emerge on the other side of musical forms and are eternalized in the material. Music is abstracted and becomes sculpture in the medium of hard surfaces and drawing on paper. The artist’s handwriting arises from the experience of the musician, who in the 1980s was a well-known blues guitarist in Berlin and a master student under Herbert Kaufmann. At the same time, Eller’s early performances were characterized by influences from Fluxus and happenings, then approaching Minimal Art and its affinities to orders and sequences. In early works, he still played musical instruments like electric guitars, pianos, etc. with stones and other hard objects; their sound pickups and strings were then mounted in other contexts of work implements for the garden and field, like rakes and brooms; with these new tools, he carried out acoustic explorations of surfaces. With his artistic set of tools, almost like a scientist, Eller explores the surfaces of buildings, their windows and floors, and the resonances of exterior spaces in relation to those of interior spaces. Streets become a symbol for drawings in motion. Everything is amplified and becomes sound in space. His materials research plumbs hidden acoustic qualities that are given rhythmic structure through motions. The processes of such inscribings sometimes leave optical traces on the material, as well. This work centers on aesthetic questions of the perspectives of movements and materials.

Bill Fontana
Bill Fontana, born in 1947 in Cleveland, USA and a student of Phillip Corner in New York, is one of the world’s leading sound artists. His development began with the exploration of the spatial characteristics of sound fields. In 1975, he began working with the Australian broadcasting company ABC, recording sound landscapes on site. Here he developed his spatial thinking about sounds. The trained composer calls himself a sound sculptor whose primary goal is to explore the meanings of everyday perception of acoustic events. Acoustic material has symbolic meanings and often also carries a historical dimension. Since the 1980s, Fontana has worked with segments of landscapes and urban regions. At first he used simple tape recorders, but today he always works with high-quality, innovative technology, which leading companies provide him. He makes his recordings with directional microphones, focused beam lamps, and technical recorders as used in espionage technology. He thereby connects sites that lie several thousand kilometers apart and synchronizes events that create a global acoustic simultaneity in several points on the earth. Art connects. In 1987, with Satellite Sound Bridge Köln – San Francisco, he realized the first transatlantic sculpture connecting two metropolises that are important to him: Cologne, the seat of WDR broadcasting company, where he was able to realize numerous projects in Europe, and his home city, San Francisco. The square of the Cologne Cathedral was acoustically connected with the Golden Gate Bridge, which is acoustically characterized by the natural surroundings near the anchorage by Fort Point, with pounding waves and the signals of the foghorns used in the site’s frequent fog. In Cologne, the acoustic silhouette is characterized by the various Rhine bridges and the ringing bells of the six Romanesque churches, in connection with the inner city main train station. Acoustical Visions of Venice stands in the tradition of acoustic images of cities, which can have a postcard effect. Twelve squares, like personal viewing points, were selected. Images of the sound and video installation produced in 1999 for the Venice Biennial develop like an acoustic diary.

Terry Fox
Terry Fox, born in 1943 in Seattle, studied painting and has worked with sound since the 1970s. He emphasizes sculptural and visual material, rather than musical contexts. While avoiding the terminology of music, he nonetheless designs installations out of the material of instrument building and quotes forms of older music. Thus, during his DAAD stipend (1980-81), he traced the course of the Berlin Wall, which ran through the city’s Kreuzberg district. A historical work was the result; 25 years later, it displays typical stages of artistic work in the sketches and score. Fox observed that the Wall wended its way, oblivious to the private sphere of local residents, and became the emblem of a gross intervention. The Wall divided streets, squares, and buildings. He created the sound map as a score, an audible geography of the new surroundings. Salient points were determined, and figures arose from the inscriptions on the Wall, which Fox compared to the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion. The artist became a cartographer who fused topographical, cosmic, and individual dimensions in the medium of Sound Art. This map was interpreted anew. Finally, the length of the Wall was set in a temporal analogy to the acoustic forms. Six salient points defined the districts of East and West Berlin, which were translated into six categories and outfitted with fragments of previously recorded sounds. The result was a 10-meter-long score: Berlin Wall Score. Fox created a tape loop from various materials: acoustic events from the sounds of a self-built string instrument in San Francisco, recordings of room-filling piano strings running in parallel in the studio, the sounds of the military helicopters that kept watch over the Wall in direct proximity to Mariannenplatz, and on-site sounds like rain, thunder, and church bells. All the acoustic events that characterized the surroundings of the buildings at the time of the recordings 25 years ago, as the weather and time of day changed, are irretrievable. In recent years, the surrounding buildings and the acoustic spectrum of traffic have changed. The sound of the bells has remained. The traces of the Wall that once divided Berlin are fading into forgetfulness; this artistic cartography may remind us of it.

Rolf Julius
Since the mid-1970s, Rolf Julius has worked with the interactions between music and visual art, which first led him to photo-body actions in 1976. Like some of his artist colleagues in Berlin, Julius also created his first Sound Art pieces in Charlottenburg district’s Galerie Giannozzo. He developed his artistic language in minimalistic photo series, Musik für einen kleinen weißen Raum (Music for a Small White Room), and his first tape composition. Actions with musical elements outdoors were given poetic titles. His material includes ink drawings on his projects, musical actions with interval buzzers, and installations with pigments, tea bowls, stones, and loudspeakers. The loudspeakers are controlled with finely-veined wires and often look like drawings. Fascinating contrasts arise from these elements. Connections to nature are an essential component. Thus, in the sculpture museum Glaskasten in Marl in 1994, Julius exhibited a collection of drawings that go back to a visit to Pará, Brazil in the context of the exhibition Arte Amazonas. Impressive images arose in the simple conditions of the flooded region and flowed into the drawings. “Day and night the chirp of the cicadas and the bright croaking of many thousands of tiny frogs in the swamp waters around us; it was hot and humid, and when the cloudbursts came down in the late afternoon, there was hardly any difference between the air and the water. The elements blurred into each other in general: sounds swam, leaves sprouted from my loudspeakers and became flowers… I have tried to capture some of this in my drawings.” Typically for Julius, motifs of flowing are an essential component of compositions and drawings. Nature in urban surroundings motivated works in his New York period, where he had a studio in PS 1. There he created Music for the Bronx 3, probably Julius’ loudest work. With two gray ghetto blaster loudspeakers a radio part, it took place in the Bronx. Ghetto blasters, a synonym for music on the street, became a program. Julius says, “I think I made a mistake with this loud and aggressive work.”

On Kawara
On Kawara was born in 1933 in Karaiya, Aichi, Japan. He has lived in New York since 1965 and composed the first Date Painting in 1996. The passage of time became his handwriting. From September 1, 1968 in Uruguay, through Hotel Monte Carlo, Mexico, to September 16, 1979 in Elin Hälsingholmen, Stockholm, Sweden, he mailed at least 186 postcards to two addresses, noting the time of day when he got up and the sites as return addresses. Signs of life and autobiography were eternalized in sequences of cards for various addressees, traces of his own life captured in travel images. Cards with a 10x15 cm format were rubber stamped with standardized information. Broad panoramas dominate as a picture format; maps of the landscape show elevation lines of the topography. On Kawara’s concept: to send two postcards to friends each day from wherever he happened to be. Each day, he traced on a map the routes he put behind him from midnight to midnight. Among the friends in question are gallerists, artists, and collectors, including Kasper König, Konrad Fischer, Harald Szeemann, Josef Kosuth, and Barbara Richter. With the idea of creating and eternalizing structures as a traveler, he enlarges individual biographical sequences in the medium of art. The dynamic of the appearance and disappearance of the sender and addressee thereby plays a role as important as the eternal traveler’s orientation and reassurance of his friends. The trip becomes the artist’s medium. This is also the pattern upon which he conceived the collection of telegrams that he sent from February 4, 1970 to December 1977. The idea for I AM STILL ALIVE – Telegrams arose in 1976, when On Kawara lived in Berlin as a guest of Berlin’s DAAD artists program. His epically conceived monumental work One Million Years (Past and Future) abstracts time in the form of data, as number. The speakers Richard Hucke and Anne Esser read aloud parts of the typewritten set of figures at the dokumenta 11. The installation brings excerpts from the years 994,992-993,371 BC (Past 7+8) and 5566-6900 AD (7+8 Future).

Thomas Köner
Thomas Köner impressively thematizes acoustic traces and frozen perspectives in installations like Banlieue du Vide (2004), Suburbs of the Void (2004, and NUUK (2004). Urban spaces and solitary landscapes are the subjects of film sequences that spread melancholy. Passages of polyphonic hissing and smatterings of playing children break up the scenes. Köner creates breathing images with acoustic and visual atmospheres that enliven almost unmoving film images. He uses image sequences from web cams as raw material that displays only the traces of people and their vehicles, which appear acoustically in the picture, but not in motion. Changes from day to night and the influence of the weather bring motion into the image. At about 6 minutes, NUUK is Köner’s shortest work. In it, more than 3,000 individual web cam images were taken from the Internet and assembled to a scene. Despite the cinematic image motion, it seems like a still photo. The time-lapse cinematic long shot presents nothing but changes in the light on the urban scene. The documents condense to an almost monochromatic, gray/white film style. Acoustic movements emerge plastically. In the montage of visual/acoustic perspectives, movements no longer occur except on the surface of a snow landscape that, by no means coincidentally, recalls a projection screen. The winter scene of the city comes alive as an acoustic atmosphere and thematizes relations in eye and ear perception. The nocturnal scene veritably challenges the viewer to grasp these relations of artistically placed condensations as a process that in reality consists solely of individual pictures taken at long intervals. The passage of film time and of viewing time is not synchronous. The lofty standpoint of Köner’s camera puts us in the raw and dry winter of northern Finland, near the Arctic Circle. He thereby reminds us of the preconditions of perception and the interplay between eyes and ears.

Bernhard Leitner
Bernhard Leitner, born in 1938 in Innsbruck, Austria, is an architect and Professor for Design at the College of Applied Art in Vienna. He began his work in urban design for New York City with practical and theoretical studies of the phenomena of spatial-plastic forms, which were tested with loudspeakers distributed over long stretches on the floors of gymnasiums. Dynamic sequences give the listener the impression of spatial figures. First, the listeners experience pendulum motion under their feet. Physical/artistic research of this kind is characteristic of Leitner’s work, which, with artistic means, brings to memory knowledge of acoustics and gestalt theory. With encyclopedic passion, Leitner is able to shape ever more complex movements of tones in spaces and even in the interior spaces of the human body. His sound movements create 4-dimensional spaces and thereby outperform the newest sound systems of the film industry. Architectonic forms brought into materials like iron, granite, and marble supplement each other with umbrellas and sun loungers. The latter characterize various phases of the work. Along with the temporary installations, since 1984 Leitner has also realized permanent installations like Ton-Raum (Tone-Space, Berlin 1984), Le Cylindre sonore (The Sonorous Cylinder, Paris 1987), Wasserspiegel (Water Level/Mirror, Donaueschingen 1997), and Raumquellen (Space Sources, Berlin 1998), which contributed to establishing Sound Art as an art form. Leitner understands himself as an architect of sound. The architectonic concept of the Technical University’s Tone-Space is based on the square metal architecture with a volume of 218.5 m3. The room seems like a metal pass-through pavilion whose inner surfaces consist of perforated sheet metal. The sketches show the tone movements of the 42 loudspeakers, which are not visible in the original. Depending on how the work is programmed, various acoustic sequences can be activated, whose differentiated shaping has been pre-calculated. A wide variety of movements that can be experienced in space are based on the networks of the perceived lines resulting from the dynamic crescendos and diminuendos, volume levels, directing of the loudspeakers in various points in the room, etc. But the seemingly plastic movements are based on point-sized acoustic appearances that the listeners grasp as gestalts. The sound-space performance 8 Ton-Räume (1985) was created in collaboration with the DAAD: Circle Run Play; Room Jumping, Room Whirring; Breathing Diagonals; Room Rhythm; Elastic Lines; Room Waves; and Intertwining.

Dieter Schnebel
Dieter Schnebel, born in 1930 in Lahr in Germany’s Black Forest, studied music in Freiburg and attended the Kranichstein holiday courses in New Music from 1952 to 1956. At the same time, he studied philosophy and musicology in Tübingen. Between 1953 and 1959, he wrote serial compositions like Versuche für variable Ensembles (Experiments for Variable Ensembles), phonetically and spatially structured works like Glossolalie, for speakers and instruments, and Das Urteil (The Judgment), scored music for ensemble. Between 1960 and 1976, he composed visible music, a processual music for a conductor, without instruments. Gestures were researched, isolated, and made independent as musical activities. In 1963, Schnebel became a religion teacher at the Wöhler School in Frankfurt am Main; in 1976, he became Professor for Experimental Music and Musicology in Berlin. He founded the experimental theater group, the Maulwerker (Mouth Workers), which still exists today. Then came numerous concerts and guest lectures in Europe, the USA, Asia, and Israel. In 1991, Schnebel became a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts and, in 1995, of the Bavarian Academy of Arts. In 1999, he received the European Church Music Prize of the City of Schwäbisch Gmünd. In 2000, he wrote Harley-Davidson I-IV for Trombone and 9 Motorcycles. A year later, Dieter Schnebel’s Signatur 33 appeared as an edition in Verlag Rommerskirchen; it is an autobiography of the composer’s life and work in the form of an extensive score. In 2005, the world premiere of the 3rd movement of Symphony X was ceremoniously performed in the Berlin Philharmonic. The score of his life appears far from completed, so we show the state achieved by the end of the year 1999.

Peter Vogel
Cybernetic objects that seem like little machines with electronic circuits respond to the visitors’ movements, and this in changing forms for more than 30 years. In 1975, Peter Vogel created the Musikalisch-Kybernetische Environment as interactive sculptures in the traditions of kinetic objects, commissioned by SWF broadcasting company in Baden-Baden for the Donaueschingen Music Days. The components of the score include the electrical circuits, the spatial concept of the installation, and a reaction score that presents examples of typical triggering and control processes. The work was published as an artist’s score in the Edition Galerie Holeczek, rather than with a musical publisher. Against the background of kinetic sculptures, Vogel quotes and develops the fluctuations of light, sound, and wind. In accordance with the technical construction, they suggest movements that are triggered by the viewers. Vogel’s objects are characterized by ambitious qualities. The circuits are intelligent, i.e., learning, developed from schemes from cognition research, the field in which – before he became an artist – the engineer worked between 1965 and 1975 in brain research for Hoffman-La Roche in Basel, Switzerland. Sequences like stimulus – response – learning are taken as a model in order to quote excerpts of complex processes. But the cognitive achievement of intelligence in these pieces reaches the level of one-celled organisms, at best. If movements of the sculptures result in sequences that recall natural movements, then, in the kinetic tradition, this alludes to relationships between human and machine in the sense of “ironic allegories”. In this way, Vogel’s interactive sculptures emblematize movements that run their course without recognizable goals. The movement is sufficient unto itself as a play of form; it abstracts previously planned sequences and spurs its vis-à-vis to engage in actions that the sculpture then reflects. The sculpture’s movements reward the visitor for his curiosity, a concept that creates an ambivalence: Who is playing with whom here? The stimulation determines the shaping of time; it the stimulus is lacking, the result is a standstill.

Tim White-Sobieski and Brian Eno
Ambient music and installation art combine on a high artistic level in the video installation Terminal, which stands as a lyrical poem in a series of otherwise abstract and fictional tales by the New York video artist Tim White (1969). Characteristic for his image language is the material he takes up from television documentations and artistically commentates in the medium of video and sound installations. He processes it with software he developed himself, sometimes dissolving its forms and contours, bringing it into an iridescent play of changing colors, and liquefying it in slow transitions. Overlayings of self-generating sequences arise from generators of randomness. The background of Terminal is White’s personal experiences following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York. Empty airplanes, empty airports, and a city overcast with asbestos dust for months combine with his memorial for the numerous people he lost on this day. It all shows up as an artistic reflection in the not quite 7-minute video loop. It was programmatically set to the music of Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm on the album Drawn From Life (Night Traffic – Terminal 2, Bloom – Terminal 1). “Terminal” is a symbol, including as a tool and keyboard of a PC. The video contains a few short sequences of the subway station that lay beneath the World Trade Center and that, after the attack, could be used only to transfer to other trains. Through the collaboration with Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm, Terminal resumes after more than 20 years the theme of the airport that already led Eno to develop Ambient Music at the end of the 1970s with Ambient Music for Airports. Here the well-known avant-garde rock musician explicitly referred to Erik Satie’s concept of a Musique d’Ameublement, which the composer sent to his correspondent Jean Cocteau in 1918. Thus, a line can be drawn connecting the various epochs: installation – Ambient Music – Musique d’Ameublement.