Beauty. Order. Cleanliness. Purity. Perfection. To all of these coveted qualities, hair is a threat, a flaw, a disturbance. When someone is well-groomed, we describe them as “not having a hair on her head out of place”, signifying that hair is something to be put into its place, to be kept under control. There are many places where hair is not supposed to be: stuck on your sweater, floating in your soup, appearing on a projected film frame, beyond the acceptable areas and lengths on one’s body, etc. And so, when we are confronted with its appearance in a work of art, we are unsure: do the same rules apply here? Should I be delighted or disgusted? As always, the use of unconventional materials in art forces us to make up our own minds.

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In her art work, Fiene Scharp, based in Berlin, works regularly with materials such as hair, grease, and wax. She describes her focus as being “the moment of touching in which the touch-er and the touch-ee become aware of themselves and the other.” In a primarily visual context such as art exhibitions, touching is often forbidden, but perception is not. Scharp’s use of hair challenges these boundaries by placing the viewer in a position somewhere between attraction and repulsion. A 100-cm cube composed completely of human hair somehow knocks our perception for a loop: questions arise as to from where the hair originated and whether it is too much while, at the same time, impulses are suppressed to reach out and stroke it. Otherwise conventional forms such as delicate weaves or graphs on paper shock us when we realize that they are made of hairs. Carefully placed hairs on ordinary food items such as butter or a lemon provoke us with their violation of propriety.

Scharp uses the video format to bring her fixation with capturing this complicated relation to the sense of touch to the next level. Tiny hairs between an index finger and thumb bristle audibly as they act as a barrier between their contact on one video, two hands slowly polish a rough sheet of ice into a smooth, reflective surface in another. Although we as viewers are still limited in our access to the works to the senses of sight and sound, the sense of touch is the focus, and, once again, cannot be taken for granted. For this purpose, Scharp refers to another all-too-human material, skin, which she describes as “a metaphor for the state of being separate, as well as a membrane.” References to hair and skin confront us with our own corporeality and challenge us to place such normally mundane materials in a new context, not only in art, but in life as well. (jn)

Götz Valien calls himself a “picture-maker”. The term seems to refer to someone who produces a handicraft rather than a work of art. However, when one looks at his work as a whole, the self-designation “picture-maker” loses the crudeness that one might be tempted to initially expect.

It is not necessarily the same whether one paints pictures or whether one engages with the creation of pictures as a phenomenon through painting. As a picture-maker, Götz Valien is interested in the efficiency with which pictures release, whether emotionally, consciously, or unconsciously, that which is buried deep within us, in the same way figurative language can. In his work, he uses this effectiveness and at the same time, exposes it—that is the agenda behind his picture-making art.

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The artist uses the wishful-thinking-oriented visual language of both our earlier and current entertainment and advertising industries—in particular, art deco. He freely borrows from their themes, breaking through these proposed dreams of reality by way of surreal exaggeration and the integration of typographic elements. The material context to which his pictures refer becomes the virtual image, the ideal. Reality is exposed as virtual realism.

“Whether it’s kitsch, cliché, advertisement, slapstick, or fine art, it must always seduce, but at the same time, this seduction must be undisguised in order to create a true ‘spiritual surplus’ ”, says Valien. In order to invoke such an impression on the viewer, as well as an awareness of the effect, he not only falls back on his experiences as a contemporary of a mediatised and populist world, but also on his historical knowledge of the technique of painting and how it has evolved according to art history. Art deco-like interior and exterior spaces, visions of modern life painted in the iconography of the 1920s, desires—beauty, exclusivity, wealth, passion, sensuality, sex, progress—which refer to the visual language of earlier times and the advertising iconography of today. The current art world is also referenced: ” No Buy Oshi” grows in 20th Century Fox Intro-type characters (or Universal Pictures) into the evening sky, in the foreground is a woman out of control.

Born in 1960, Götz Valien grew up in Salzburg and currently resides in Berlin, where he works as a picture-maker, as well as as a cinema poster artist. For a long time, he says, he considered this handicraft to be separate from his art. However, upon closer examination, it has overlapped with his activity as a picture-maker of virtual reality.

Götz Valien’s poster work can still be seen on the front of the Kino International, as well as the Zoo Palast, his paintings have been exhibited at the Preview Berlin as well as at the Scope Miami, London, and New York. (wh/jn)

His works are inventions, usually connecting technology and software and interactive works of art. To some, says Julius von Bismarck, he’s a designer, to others, an artist, and for the other third, an inventive aristocrat. He has enjoyed success in his work, regardless of which category he is put under, because what he creates is not only exceptional on a technical level, it is also imaginative, confrontational, and critical of society and unexpected at the same time.

In particular, his 2008 work, “Fulgurator”, has made its way through the blogging circuit. He calls this work his “apparatus for a minimally invasive manipulation of photography”. This pistol-like device is like a reversely functioning camera which operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. During Barack Obama’s international election campaign appearance at the Berlin Siegessäule, he used the device to project a bright cross on the lectern, which appears in all other photographs taken of it at the same time. He also used it to project the image of a dove, a symbol of peace, onto Tiananmen Square (Gate of Heavenly Peace), which would then appear in other’s photos of the portrait of Mao. In 2008, von Bismarck received the Ars Electronica award for interactive art for the Fulgurator.

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Two former interactive projects of the artist living in Berlin are the “Top Shot Helmet” and the “Fühlometer”, through which one can read the average mood of the Berlin citizens, collected and determined by a sophisticated software system, in the form of a representative smiley-face projected on a huge screen on the Gasometer Schöneberg building. The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is Julius von Bismarck’s most recent artistic project. The uninterrupted, continuous stories that are told, according to a basic description of this artwork, flow seamlessly from one topic to another, from one detail to the next. The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings. The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext. A significant amount of the things we encounter day after day is incorporated into this patent history—an invention that interminably reminds us of an overly possessive and commercialized world. (wh/jn)

The American sound artist, Douglas Henderson, studied composition and theory at Princeton University under Milton Babbitt, a pioneer of synthesizers and Pulitzer Prize winner, Elie Yarden, and J.K. Randall, co-editor of the magazine, Perspectives of New Music.
Henderson currently resides in Brooklyn and, after receiving a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2007, in Berlin. His artistic work has been supported by renowned foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Foundation of Contemporary Art New York, and numerous other grants; his list of exhibition activities and performances is as noteworthy as it is international. His compositional work has been presented at countless computer and new music festivals ranging from Seoul to New York. He has collaborated intensely with modern dance choreographers, composing for the likes of Jeremy Nelson, David Zambrano, and Meg Stuart, as well as for numerous dance theatres across Europe and the US.

Visible Sound

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Part 2. Playback

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The work of this composer and performer is located somewhere in the scope of multi-channel electro-acoustic composition. However, he is not only concerned with purely acoustic work, rather, he is consistently devoted to making sound visible. He didn’t really want to begin, says the artist, with the common perception of music, and wanted to be less concerned with how music sounds than how it looks. This does not mean that the acoustic intensity would be negligible, but rather that it would serve as a reference that determines which approach his compositional work takes. His recording, “Icebreaker”, performed at the Hudson Opera House, awakes paranoid feelings in the listener, who feels as if a sheet of ice is cracking underneath his/her own feet and shattering into a million tiny bits. His loudspeakers, painted in swimming-pool blue and filled with water, lean once again in a more visual direction. Henderson compares this 2003 piece with abstract painting, and as a composer, he considers it representative of a large part of his work.

Lately, the artist has also turned his attention to constructing instruments in the form of space installations. Strings are stretched across the spaces and entire building structures are utilized as bodies of sound. They are activated by machines and challenge the movements of the visitors, who come to realize that they are triggering what they are hearing with their own bodies. (wh/jn)

In the modern, functionally disenchanted world, those who seek out magical moments must first acknowledge reality, but still hold on to the belief that that which is possible can reveal itself in reality. The magic of enchantment exists in transformation. It is based on the ability of the ordinary, banal, and overlooked to wake the fantasy buried within ourselves.

Two parallel curved pencils experience togetherness. Small flames burn from the valves of the tires of a casually parked bicycle. Lighters positioned next to each other share an adjoining flame. The Israeli artist Ariel Schlesinger describes himself as a little romantic. His sense for the fantastic and awareness of the possible as that which is overlooked in reality are two jumping-off points for his art, which magically draws in and fascinates viewers through subtle interventions.

Ariel Schlesinger grew up in Israel and studied at the Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Currently, he lives and seeks out magical moments in Berlin and Tel Aviv. His art is characterized by object art and installation.

In his work, Schlesinger uses found objects, building them up into larger works. Installed on a stepladder with cable straps, a cheap power drill on its last legs of battery power propels a gear that ends with a showerhead, which in turn releases a gas-filled soap bubble that floats down and bursts with a loud bang into the reality of an incandescent grid.

The relics from everyday life gathered by the artist seem to be cobbled together in their artistic reconstruction. The do-it-yourself aesthetic prevails: one can also be enchanted by simple things—as a child constantly experiences in play—which are often veiled by the slick product design that is the result of a lack of imagination in the adult world. (wh/jn)

Most of his sound installations are not recorded. They would not function on loudspeakers or headphones, says Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag, because his compositions typically use the entire body as an acoustic reception space. It can be good that the sound does not penetrate the through the eardrum, but instead, for example, through the soles of the feet - for those who would stand on their own loudspeakers. Sonntag’s artistic achievements involve interfaces between the human body, technical media systems, and sound-mediated space perceptions. For example, in one project, he plunges a randomly vibrating column into the earth, whose upper edge serves as ground-level manhole. Those who step on the manhole can sense the depth of the earth with their bodies through the oscillations of the manhole, as well as experience space in a different, nonvisual way.

Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag was born in 1965. He studied trombone under Heinz Fadle at the University of Music Lübeck, then he studied eight different subjects, ranging from art history to philosophy, in Oldenburg. Since then, he has taught at universities in Istanbul, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Oldenburg, and Darmstadt.

The Architecure of Sound

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The Essence of Electricity

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Attempts at categorizations place Sonntag’s roots in minimum and conceptual art, as well as in new/experimental music. However, Sonntag prefers not to be pigeonholed. He finds the categories into which the arts are assigned too limiting. He would define himself more as a composer than as a sound artist, but his work is also visual. His favorite term would be inventor. Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag conducts science by way of art, and his prolific artistic invention has been highly recognized. He has received numerous awards and has had exhibitions everywhere from New York to Bishkek. In 2008, he opened the avant-garde festival of electronic art, Ars Electronica in Linz, with his sonArc:: a project which explored elementary forms of electricity. In search of the roots and visions of this media age, Sonntag captured the essence of electricity through the possibilities of taming lightning with his technological devices.

The tonal experience and exploration of space and questions of perspective form the other important field of the artist’s research. Sonntag seeks out possibilities of capturing tangible spatiality through sound, and thereby pose alternatives to the visual occupation of the perception of space, with its pervasion of perspective, from the field of psycho-acoustic space perception. For this CastYourArt podcast, Sonntag referred acoustically to his body sounds – the result, an aural sampling of the thought process of the artist as well as a body sound collage… (wh/jn)

The early work of Nadine Rennert can be considered abstract art. It explores the formal possibilities of its material. It plumbs the depths of its soul, says the artist.

The work of the Berlin-based artist has moved lately more in the direction of figurative art. The use of materials such as fleece, wool, leather, skin or down remains the same, as well as the approach of trying to find what lies within the raw material, within its soul. What has changed is that the material of her work must now be understood in a broader sense. Individual sentences in the form of statements and situations from stories and fairy tales have been added. These materials originate from the interweaving of individual lives in their social and temporal circumstances. In her sculptural work, Nadine Rennert finds an up-to-date form for these sometime archaic materials through their internal tensions. The used materials sustain these translations into the now. They display the signs of their use, referring to the everyday, to real life. Quietly and unknowingly, they make their way into the lives of their viewers.

What characteristics have we retained through our schooling and the circumstances of our upbringing? What about us has its own history, goes its own way? What do we carry with us? Rennert’s sculptures urge us to question ourselves. They touch upon deeply buried layers: integrity, vulnerability, belonging, being alone or outcast. Her work gets to the nitty-gritty of things.

When the artist investigates the possibilities of her materials, she opens up that which has been well stored away and preserved in the cellar of our existence, exposing it to the world. The ideas for her work develop in this vulnerable interim of awaking, when certain impressions get caught in the light of our half-conscious dream state and then tend to retreat back into the dark depths of the subconscious. These sealed-up goods are uncorked by the work of the artist.

That which is deep-seated is expressed in Rennert’s work with literal openness. On the one hand, it is obvious but on the other hand, not completely articulated, remaining open enough to stir up the viewer’s own history. The artist describes her work as an open-ended invitation that can be met with curiosity. For the sake of argument, through her work, the artist realizes potentials and develops counterpositions against the defenses within ourselves. (wh/jn)

Carlos Sandoval is a sound artist. Sandoval’s own definition of his work includes sound design, sound speculation, improvisation, classical composition, and a combination of all of the above. In the work of the artist, the dissolution of the composer as the ruling subject of the music plays an important role. For example, for his installation of trees, “Baumberauschen”, in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin, nature is the designated composer of the music. The trees are equipped with sensors which detect their movements, caused by wind and growth, and direct these impulses with sounds from sound archives.

Paring Down. Part 1

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Wind in the Trees. Part 2

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The artist teaches improvisation and composition as complementary strategies at the Universität der Künste Berlin. The multifaceted approach to planning and spontaneity is a reflection of Sandoval’s focus: the withdrawal of the controlling subject from the music, which can also be found in Sandoval’s 2008 collaboration for the program of the “Interaktion Festival”, called “The Tilt Group”. Sixteen musicians participated, paired up randomly, in a competition for the best musical interaction.

The artist has an experimental and unusual concept of music. His works are sound manipulations, sound improvisations, sound installations. His raw material includes everything from the cries of a flock of birds to street noise to electronic toy sounds to the moans of couples in the throes of ecstasy. The instruments of the artist are experimental developments. For example, over the course of one decade, during repeated stays at the STEIM Foundation in the Netherlands, Sandoval has developed a digital data entry glove from which he is able to control and work on sound samples live from the computer.

Carlos Sandoval was born and grew up in Mexico. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he was trained in piano construction and tuning at Bösendorfer in Vienna. He then completed his studies in Mexico at the National School of Music Composition, studying theory with Estrada. Presently, Sandoval works as a freelance composer and musician in Berlin. (wh/jn)

People go through life with open ears – they cannot close their ears, as they can their eyes, to the sounds of the world, unless they physically block them. The ear is a completely closed off sensory organ. We hear, even when we sleep. We hear sharply only rarely and perceive differently, those noises which surround and penetrate us. If we tune into ourselves and back in time, not only the sounds from streetcar, cow-, door-, recess, fire brigade, church, or bicycle bells resonate within us, but also an amazingly extensive audio cosmos. We come to learn that sounds have emotional connotations, that our feelings have different intonations.

Sam Auinger is engaged with the world of sounds, tones, and noises and their geographical-cultural as well as historical differences. He thereby carries on a tradition of artistic involvement with sound in which people such as Erik Satie, Luigi Russolo, John Cage, and Murray Schäfer made history. Trained at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz and University Mozarteum Salzburg, he made himself a name as a composer and sound artist, as well as a researcher and architect in the world of sound and its effects. His works, which depict different worlds of sound, are presented worldwide as performances, installations, experiments, films, and videos, and invite a conscious recollection of ones own horizon of sound. In his work, “Sechse läuten”, for example, he collected noises from his childhood, listening for which tones followed him into adulthood, determining which came to him out of joy, obedience, feeling left out, familiarity, or fear.

A Hearing Perspective

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Not only sounds themselves, but their location have a character. The location as a sound object, an aspect of sound emphasized by the American avant-garde artist John Cage, is at present part of the research of the artist, who is active as a guest professor for experimental sound organization at the University of the Arts in Berlin. In his search for a new language of hearing, Sam Auinger often works in various collaborations, and publishes under the names “O+A”, ” berliner theorie”, “tamtam”, and “stadtmusik”. CastYourArt interviewed Sam Auinger in Berlin. (wh/jn)

Robert Lucander moved from Finland to Berlin one year before the Wall fell. The prospect of reunification peaked interest in the other side. Differences between east and west became clear. The painter realized, to his own surprise and fascination, that the discourse over various cultural shadings was not simply metaphorical rhetoric, but rather a very real detail that needed to be taken seriously: Lucander ordered industrially produced, color-standardized acrylic lacquer that had been produced in the east. In comparison to the same western version of the product, it exhibited an amazingly different quality of color.

The experience of limiting the artistic material to cultural characteristics strengthened Lucander’s interest in a force of expression which does not only result from the creative act of the artist, but which lies within the given material already. He begins by investigating the material as a medium with temporal, geographical, and cultural forces of expression, and looks for possibilities to emphasize what information already lies within it. Thus, he uses industrially produced paints and strictly adheres to the selection of colors from the annually newly offered color pattern selections. In the artistic handling of the colors, he limits himself to the current instructions regarding the acrylic lacquer doses. The color materials thereby subject his work to the taste, geographical environment, and time of their development, and the work of the artist begins to demonstrate its predetermined qualities through contrasting arrangements.

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One of these contrasting media is the substrate itself. Robert Lucander paints on industrially manufactured plywood boards, which he gets cut according to the grain and then glued. The grain - which has a particular quality similar to the human fingerprint and which the artist uses as a compositional element - works in the paintings as a contrasting material to the mass-produced acrylic, whose material characteristics as decorative color with even covering strength and flowing brush lines can be superficially perceived as de-individualizing and generic.

The artist outlines places where the grain is left visible with pencil. He uses these defaults in the wood as areas in which he can explore spatial as well as individually personal depths in his primarily humanly representative work. The face and body characteristics of the human figures that emerge from the depth of character of the plywood substrate stand in contrast to the glossy pages of fashion magazines from which the painter faithfully depicts the details of the faces and bodies. These models are torn away from their glamorous contexts in the work of the painter and placed into an everyday, mundane framework.

According to Lucander, he does not try to insert his own meaning, opinion, or views into his work, rather, he tries to emphasize, through his artistic practice, what is apparent as a witness. That which we read into or note about his work is left up to us as viewers. His paintings are not memorials of the life of an artistic genius inverted outwards, but rather snapshots of a sort, capturing a certain moment in time. (wh/jn)