OBJECTS AND BODIES
Sound Installation | video screens, modular audio visual system, sound system, transducers, cymbal | 2021
Group show, Techno Worlds, A Goethe-Institut exhibition on view in museums and other exhibition venues internationally, 2021 – to present
Curators: Mathilde Weh, Justin Hoffmann and Creamcake
Artists: DeForrest Brown, Jr., Jaqueline Caux, Tony Cokes, Chicks on Speed, Zuzanna Czebatul, Aleksandra Domanović, Kerstin Greiner, AbuQuadim Haqq, Rangoato Hlasane, Ryõji Ikeda, Maryam Jafri, Robert Lippok, M+M, Henrike Naumann & Bastian Hagedorn, Mamba Negra, Carsten Nicolai, Vinca Petersen, Daniel Pflumm, Lisa Rovner, Sarah Schönfeld, Jeremy Shaw, The Otolith Group, Dominique White and Tobias Zielony
OBJECTS AND BODIES
Objects and Bodies is a minimal gesture of maximum projection. A pulse is
created from a low frequency oscilator, an electro dynamical exciter
adds vibration to the surface of a cymbal, Hand-blown glass resonators
transform the sound. The signal is sent through a modular system and
executed by clock dividers while the visual elements are created by a group
of video synthesizers, transferred to monitors. Bright synthetic colours
colonise the screens. For Robert Lippok, this is the way the soul of techno is
reproduced, from these essential means and deliberately evading the use of
a computer.
Spatially, the piece evokes its environmental structure, while the continuous
rhythm generated from minimal loops gives rise to an undoubtedly corporeal
experience, eroding the space around us. For the artist, Objects and Bodies
is a joyful and straightforward statement about his sincere and profound
experiences with techno. The piece makes us feel the complexity of techno
the spatial sense of sound that not only highlights the experimental, the
anonymous, the underground, or the artistic side of techno, but also its
transcendence.
Repetition and simplicity are the essence of techno, as well as, Objects and
Bodies’s soul. As explained by Tilman Baumgärtel in his book Schleifen. Zur
Geschichte und Ästhetik des Loops: “By making the moment repeatable,
loops oppose the passage of time with a non-linear alternative. While on the
one hand pleasure becomes tediousness, at the same time transcendence
emerges from boredom.” Repetitive sounds, smoke and movement have
been the recipe for transcendence from time immemorial. Clubs can be, why
not, spiritual places. Clubbing has multifarious layers. They are places in
which to relate, in which one could feel other bodies around and
communicate. A dance floor is place where many things can happen. One
comes closer to oneself, cutting off from everything that disturbs us in society.
Dance floor could be a place to generate seed of change, a place for
revolution. As it happened already in the 90s in the underground Berlin club
scene.
Objects and Bodies reminds us the total variance of time, the understanding
of experimenting with loops -both visually and sonically- as an artistic
process and as a stepping-stone towards the implementation of the current
culture of repetition. With its techno-induced blissful, simple, ecstatic and
repetitive rhythm, it becomes the clock that brings us to the past, to the
beginnings. An opportunity to really find time and space to reflect on the
developments and forces that shaped techno culture from the 1990s up to
today. And it has the potential to make us feel empowered for transformation
Objects and Bodies is a simple gesture of maximum transcendence.
Text by María Muñoz
