Radio ist Kino im Kopf, sagt man. Beim
Zuhören entstehen Bilder in der Vorstellung der
Hörerinnen
und Hörer, insofern ist das Radio kein rein akustisches
Medium,
sondern hat auch visuelle Aspekte. Ebenso sind visuelle Medien nicht
allein auf die Wahrnehmung von Bildern beschränkt. In diesem
Sinn
gibt es keine Kommunikationsform, die ausschließlich einen
Sinn
anspricht. Es gibt nur unterschiedliche Gewichtungen von Standbildern
oder bewegten Bildern, von Sprache, Geräuschen, Musik,
taktilen
und anderen Erfahrungen.
Ausgehend von solchen Überlegungen haben die beiden
australischen
Künstler Colin und Yanna Black, die das Webradio-Projekt
Frequency
OZ betreiben, eine Radiokunst-Serie zusammengestellt, deren acht
Episoden im Februar und März in Kunstradio-Radiokunst zu
hören sind. Zu hören und zu sehen, um genau zu sein,
denn es
geht bei der Reihe “The Transmuted Signal” eben um
die
Übersetzung zwischen verschiedenen Modalitäten der
Wahrnehmung.
Wesentlich ist dabei, dass die originalgetreue Übersetzung
zwischen den Medien weniger von Bedeutung ist, als die
Veränderungen eines Originals und Abweichungen von diesem, die
mit
einem Umwandlungsprozess einhergehen.
Frequency OZ haben insgesamt acht Künstlerinnen und
Künstler
mit einem Bild konfrontiert, mit einem visuellen Signal also, das es zu
verschlüsseln und in eine akustische Form zu bringen galt,
sodass
die resultierenden Audioversionen miteinander verglichen werden
können. Im Anschluss wurden alle Teilnehmerinnen und
Teilnehmer
dieses künstlerischen Experiments gebeten, das impulsgebende
Bild
zu zerstören. Das Bild ist allein in seiner auditiven
Transmutation erhalten, in Form von acht Hörstücken.
Das Kunstradio sendet diese Stücke im Rahmen der Sendereihe
„curated by“, die vorsieht, dass
Künstlerinnen und
Künstler on air und online Ausstellungen neuer Radiokunst
konzipieren und zusammenstellen. In der Vergangenheit wurden dabei ganz
unterschiedliche Aspekte der Radiokunst untersucht und
herausgearbeitet, stets jedoch wird eine Erweiterung des
Hörraums
ins Internet und umgekehrt angestrebt. Durch die Beteiligung
internationaler Künstler, wie in diesem Fall Frequency OZ aus
Australien, werden immer wieder künstlerische Positionen
präsentiert, die in Österreich nicht bekannt sind.
Die Reihe
„The Transmuted Signal“, curated by Frequency OZ,
präsentiert Arbeiten von Entoptic, Nigel Helyer, Melanie
Herbert,
Cat Hope, Lizzie Pogson, Philip Samartzis und von Colin Black selbst.
In seinem Stück „Semblance“
(„Anschein“)
sucht Black die Unsichtbarkeit des Transformationsprozess eines Bildes
zu Sound so zu steigern, dass die Vielschichtigkeit des Bildes erhalten
bleibt. Freilich ist dies – wie Black rasch erkannte
– ein
subjektives und von künstlerischem Wollen nicht entleertes
Verfahren. Ebenso wie der Prozess der Umwandlung nicht umkehrbar ist.
„By Touch“ (16’12”)
by Melanie Herbert
The sound work „By
Touch” consists of segments that seep and shift into one another
through the layering of electroacoustic sounds and textures. These
segments each explore their own sonic landscapes – some melodic
and fragmented, while others textural, rough and unpitched. The
development of the piece relies on the contrast of these elements, and
their transitory qualities.
Electric guitar features as the piece's dominant sound source,
alongside other found sounds I produced within my direct surroundings.
In the initial stage of composition these sounds were gathered through
a process of hands-on exploration and discovery, whereby I recorded my
own personal improvisation sessions with instruments and sound-making
objects for use in the piece. Processing was used to extend the sonic
palette. I focused on simple harmonies to allow the differing textures
and timbres to capture the ear of the listener.
In regards to the stimulus provided, instead of a literal
representation of the image with focused and closely hewn structure and
sounds, I chose to support it and emphasise the negative space. Rather
than trace its forceful shape, I chose to hem around its bearing. The
pressure of the hand against the observer reveals hidden arrays of
pattern, and it’s the hidden aspects more than the pressure that
typifies both the image and my work. I chose to not simply retell or
replicate the image's features with equivalent sonic qualities, instead
responding with an approach where the sound and visuals could accompany
and complement each other.
The image has a strong sense of colour and contrast, but also a strange
frailty, which I focused much of my attention on. I tried to mirror the
fragility by using high pitched sounds, delicate harmonics, and
recorded found sounds. The darker colour tones spoke directly to my
musical sensibilities, through the use of distortion and noise
elements, even when creating simpler and sweeter sounds. I found simple
and abstract visual characteristics that could relate to and parallel
sonic qualities. The image's intersecting lines resonated with the
simple intertwined melodies of the music, and on a presenting level,
the horizontal lines in the picture inspired the layered lines of the
piece. In particular, I explored interwoven textural sounds to
correlate with the intricately layered patterns of the image. I wanted
to create the detail in the image’s impression; a sense of work
eminently but lightly touched.
The music is an atmosphere, a wash of colour and ambience, providing a
background and context to the artwork, rather than trying to fill in
the blanks. I emulated the colours, lines and shapes, allowing the
visuals to direct my compositional choices. However, ultimately my
music sensibilities took control of the works' structure to create a
supporting work.
The result is a composition that harnesses both sparse and immense
sound worlds, growing and seamlessly bleeding into one another. By
Touch carries the listener through its sonic spaces, moulded by
shifting textures, varied energies, and evolving soundscapes.
„Ars Memoria Mexicana“ (30’51”)
by Nigel Helyer
The outstretched palm, perhaps that of the Buddha etched with the
precious objects; of Islam warding off evil; of Christ before Golgotha;
of a Touareg woman tattooed in cyphers or a simple punctum ~
Stop! The mind works too fast for logic, it shifts, sorts and
assembles metaphors, associations and gestalts, this hand I had seen it
before, this route map of homo faber, homo musicalis.
The blind guitarist is leaning against a lime washed wall, his eyes
rolled back looking at a universe just above the horizon, a universe
that you and I cannot see. He is seated on a small wooden stool
and spread before him, his hat containing a few coins and notes of
small denomination, his voice is worn and his guitar likewise.
Behind him on the wall is a large painted hand, palm outstretched,
marked in lines and diagrams, it announces a hole-in-the-wall
enterprise, a psychic healer perhaps or most likely in these parts, a
shaman ~ the guitarist starts to sing again.
There, the image is fixed, assigned to a place, a time and a sonic
memory, torn from its original context, whatever it may have been, now
fused to another destiny, where hands become percussive, marking out
rhythms over millennia.
Ars Memoria
There is a strong, but largely unacknowledged, relationship between
sound, site and memory, both personal and cultural, that allows us to
form complex associations and communal identities with particular
loci. This idea is embedded in our language and in part stems
from the classical concept of the Theatre of Memory, an antique
technique that enabled Orators to place memory objects, such as lengthy
quotations, within the labyrinthine spaces of classical
architecture. By visualising an architectural interior, real or
imaginary, the speaker might take a virtual walk, placing here a red
cloak over a sculpture to recall a passage of oration and there, a
sword on a table as a mnemonic trigger to locate yet another verse. By
memorising a stroll through this virtual architecture, an Orator could
retrieve a vast amount of correctly sequenced rhetoric.
Your words are preserved in the tin foil and will come back upon the
application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the
same tone of voice you spoke in then…..This tongueless,
toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb, voiceless
matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, speaks
with your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will
repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you,
every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to
whisper against this thin iron diaphragm.
Edison’s Ars Memoria concept for the phonograph
Broadcast media, recording and communications technologies have
developed at an alarming pace since Edison proposed the phonograph as
an Acoustic Ars Memoria. A series of rapid iterations have
overlaid and overwritten previous systems and modus operandi making it
easy to forget the central role that radio has played within Global
communities ~ both rural and urban. The broadcast medium has functioned
as a form of entertainment, a mechanism for nation building and as a
vital link able to transcend the tyranny of distance be it real or
imagined.
My interest is focused, not so much upon a technological trajectory but
primarily upon the role that listening plays in establishing memory,
situated within a geophysical site, to form identity and place. The
corollary of this interest also lies in its inverse, the realisation
that individual memory, as well as cultural histories, are extremely
fragile and fugitive, evaporating under the pressures of technological
and social change driven by the massive acceleration and saturation of
media information.
Over the past few years I have become increasingly drawn to create a
series of audio-portraits, manifest as sound installations, public
sound works and radio broadcasts, woven from the patterns of listening
and communication. These audio-portraits centre upon the nexus of
sound, listening, location and memory, fusing the concept of soundscape
with more narrative forms of orality and embracing community and
environment as a lived location.
The transmitted/transmuted image of the palm formed a strong resonant
gestalt, linked with a specific time, place and sonic experience.
As such Ars Memoriae Mexicana is the result of an informal
Audio-Journey through Mexico in which these questions of location,
memory and identity were very much in my daily thoughts as I traveled
through a landscape saturated in sound, music and voices. Starting with
the twin images, one transmitted and its twin, painted on the wall
behind the blind guitarist (who can be heard in the piece) I went
through my hitherto untouched audio archive to reconstruct a memory
journey that radiated outward from the guitarist’s melancholic
song.
In the recording you listen to the voices of:- the sound artist Charlie
Fox as he claps rhythmically, facing the steps of an Aztec Pyramid; the
film maker Mike Buckley sitting on a balmy evening surrounded by
crickets; acoustic ecologist Hildegard Westercamp talking in the garden
of the villa once owned by Octavia Paz; the artist Juan Gonzales de
Leon recalling a childhood walk in the alien landscape of a Primrose
Hill park in London; the journalist Miriam recounting her favourite
Mexico City sounds.
These voices float in a bed of ambient environmental sounds and
street-scapes that for the most part I have chosen not to edit or
sanitise, preferring to leave in the noise, the glitches and the
occasional less than perfect recording ~ that’s the way the world
sounds and Hollywood is a long way away geographically but even further
away philosophically!
Links:
http://www.frequencyoz.com
http://kunstradio.at/PROJECTS/CURATED_BY/OZ/
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