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

[17:09 min] download for: mobile, computer and iPod | send feedback

Part 2. Playback

[23:11 min] download for: mobile, computer and iPod | send feedback

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)

Oil on canvas, drawings, texts, performances: one must work hard on compiling the techniques of artistic expression, says the Vienna-based artist Tomak. Contentment leads to comfort. But those who only want to please others do not create art, as they are not willing to sail the upwind course.

To want to advance and to be able to persist against harsh winds are both foundations of his artistic self-positioning. Art which earns the right to be called art arises from both strength and sensitivity. One must be hard and ready to fight against inertia, to be able to separate the weak from the strong. Tomak demands this attitude from himself and expects it from others. Surrender to contentment? “Why not produce something questionable, something disturbing? Off to war!”

“This most affirmative of all spirits contradicts with every word he speaks.” Nietzsche’s portrayal of the artist fits Tomak well. He likes the theatrical aspect of Nietzsche. What he hates is the urban bourgeois bohemian and provincial regulars-reserved-table-proletarian. They are also theatrical, but in the most negative sense: they feature intellect and revolt only for show, creating homeopathic art, fighting a homeopathic fight.

By definition, one exposes oneself as an artist. One cannot exclude oneself, if one wants to be taken seriously. As an artist, one must accept injuries, which are considered part of the artistic research. Tomak uses medical abstraction in order to comprehend psychological conditions. “The life one lives leaves its mark on one’s face, so I portray life through portraying my face”. He incorporates himself into his artwork, literally to the bone. Those who want to see do not want to be spared. As Nietzsche says, “Representing terrible and questionable things is already an instinct of the power and glory of the artist: he is not afraid of them! There is no pessimistic art. Art affirms. Job affirms.” (wh/jn)

Tomak’s work will be on exhibit at the Gallery Heike Curtze in Berlin from Mai 1st to July 18th 2009.

For a long time, contemporary art was strictly a national phenomenon in Turkey and was therefore, to a large extent, ignored internationally. This has changed. In the 1970s and 80s, artists such as Füsun Onur, Ayse Erkmen, Gülsün Karamustafa, Hale Tenger have begun to break through traditional and national orientations and to bring in international influences. As international attention grew stronger in the 90s and the Istanbul Biennales offered venues of presentation and publicity to the more progressive contemporary art of Turkey, awareness of the value of this art and its development was promoted locally. The recent generation of Turkish artists profited from these changes both thematically and professionally.

One of the internationally renowned Turkish artists of the post-2000 generation is Ahmet Ögüt. The past twelve months of the 27-year-old artist, who lives and works in Istanbul and Amsterdam, have been densely packed: his work has been featured in group exhibitions in San Francisco, Berlin, Sydney, Athens, Eindhoven, Seoul, Helsinki, Santa Fe, Nimes, Malmö, Stockholm, Zagreb, London, Banja Luka, and Stuttgart. In addition, he has had solo exhibitions in Basel and Barcelona, three Biennales, as well as numerous online and print contributions.

[5:53 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Painting, performance, video, sculpture, photography, design, installation—Ahmet Ögüt utilizes a variety of artistic media in order to provide multiple ways of accessing his ideas. In his work, he captures ordinary events: actions, articles, and situations which we encounter on a daily basis and take for granted, thereby no longer falling under our range of perception. The shrewd interventions in which Ahmet Ögüt positions these everyday occurrences bring the unexpected to the surface: the instituting of national power and the fixing of both social differences and indifferences. However, idealism, hope, individual resistance, and powerlessness also become apparent. It reminds us, says Ahmet Ögüt about the effect of his art, of something which we already know, but have forgotten to notice.

In place of the often hermetic approach of theory, the artist uses the anecdotal and playful absurd in order to address his audience. Despite this seemingly lighthearted approach, his work is also critical and exhibits a clear partiality towards the inquisitive, open-minded, experimental side of mankind. He wants, says Ahmet Ögüt, not to instruct, but to remind. In his artistic-political self-conception, he is not so much interested in grand narratives, but rather in modest anecdotes, which one can easily grasp. These do not require that much time in order to be understood, leaving enough time for us to mull them over. (wh/jn)

In Amerika, Kafka’s unfinished novel, the sixteen-year-old Karl, after being seduced by a housemaid who then becomes pregnant by him, is sent to America, according to his parents’ wish. In New York, the boy, who has been cast out by his parents, begins his social downslide. In search of belonging, he experiences a world in which one only looks after oneself and which is calculated towards one’s emotional needs. He can only gain social acknowledgment and emotional intimacy at the price of subjugation and self-exploitation. In the last chapter of the never-completed novel, Karl discovers a poster for the Nature Theater of Oklahoma on the streets of New York, which promises work and a home for everyone. Karl signs up and heads west with the theater. According to Max Brod, who published the novel after Kafka’s death, the theater was planned as a place where Karl could participate and thereby find a home and himself.

[5:58 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

“All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theater that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place!” It is the obvious generosity that was communicated by the theater poster — in contrast to the calculating world of warped humanity that Karl experienced — that incites the spirit of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma theater group, led by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, and which inspired its name. Their theater is a place which invites participation, a place in which the scenes develop right in front of the audience. In Kafka’s Amerika, it is this inviting moment of the theater which increases the awareness of social indifference in everyday human interaction. The repertoire of the New York theater group also addresses everyday occurrences which are taken for granted, in order to direct attention towards them once again. The actors play out these scenarios. From these everyday movements, which are combined anew according to a random tossing of dice or dealing of cards, they create dances and new meanings and convert telephone calls into theater dialogues, as in the piece, “No Dice”.

These approaches of the theater group result in a completely unusual and humorous theater experience. In addition, they expand the meaning of and curiosity about the everyday gestures to which we have grown accustomed, but actually notice very rarely. The Nature Theater of Oklahoma was awarded the Young Directors Award at the Salzburger Festspiele 2008. (wh/jn)

As the artistic duo SIGNA, Signa Soerensen and Arthur Koestler provide our world with replicas of itself. They install reproductions of the original, three-dimensional parallel worlds, habitable cartographies: a run-down flophouse is the setting for the hopeless world of six Eastern European prostitutes who are ruled by their social degredation and the brutality of their pimps — a mystical nightmare universe consisting of forty areas filled with religious, political and social rituals. The wing of a closed-off psychiatric station, led by the female doctor, Dorine Chaikin, and her team, subject amnesia patients to a procedure that includes welfare service and discipline.

[7:44 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

The parallel worlds of SIGNA are replicas which have lost their historical and geographical attributes. The colors, costumes, furniture, in their tiniest details: these seamless properties offer temporal and regional associations, but the where and when remains indefinite. Whoever enters these worlds signs on for six, twelve, or twenty-four hour periods, and carries out a part of the happening. The power of one’s fantasy, personality, and borders begins a play between oneself and one’s other. For this year’s Steirischer Herbst, the CastYourArt team asked for a visit to the northern complex of the Dorine Chaikin Institute and received one of its rare admissions. (wh/jn)

In Heinrich Kleist’s essay, “On the Marionettentheater”, a discussion takes place between a layman and the principal dancer of the city opera. The layman, impressed by the presentation, wants to know what kind of technical mechanism has made it possible for the puppets to dance so convincingly that it seems as though dance itself has been shown in its most perfect form. The dance professional considers this for a moment, then gives an answer: When we see a “perfect” dance presentation and ask how it was done, then we’re already missing the point. It does not depend on the mechanics, nor on the perfected techniques with which the individual limbs of the puppets are handled with the most precision.

If one wants to understand why a dance appears “perfect”, it is much more effective not to focus so much on the technical perfection, but rather on the mechanisms of the representation of the dance. If these mechanisms are perfect, then the viewer who sees a movement corresponding to the represented one has to call this movement “dance”. And vice versa, when he sees movements which do not correspond to this representation of dance, even if they are also superbly performed, he does not even consider them to be dance. In short: What we perceive as dance is what corresponds to its representation.

In their workshop, “Sweat -The Movie“, Tor Lindstrand and Marten Spangberg of International Festival together with the participants take on this topic of the representation of the dance. Contemporary dance is very different and much more than what is shown to us on stage. Contemporary dance is not limited to the isolated movements which are demonstrated to us in video clips and Hollywood movies. But contemporary dance is influenced and rarely separated from such representations of dance. What is dance when the medium of its representation shifts? What is dance?

[4:31 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Lindstrand and Spangberg conceived of a workshop setting in which the participants – all professional dancers – not only reflect on typical representations of dance, either by approaching them or distancing themselves from them, but also investigate cinematic possibilities of the representation of dance and thereby contribute to the definition of dance. “Sweat - The Movie”, according to Lindstrand, is “a workshop about the production of a dance film and a dance film about this workshop, which took place as part of the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna”. Each participant took part in discussing, training, choreography, building and designing film sets, directing, shooting, and editing. The production took place over 30 days, ending with its premiere on the 31st day, August 8th 2008 at Kasino am Schwarzenbergplatz, Vienna.

This beautiful song annihilates, at least since the group Fuckhead has been celebrating its progressive deconstruction in a big way. Already captivated in recent years by the adrenaline kick of the mosh pit, the musicians and performers Aigner, Bruckmayr, Strohmann, Kern, Jöchtl, and Pittermann got their start originally as a noise-rock band. Along with their music and audience members, who are integrated onto the stage, Tableaux Vivants-type held-pose ending scenes have allowed Fuckhead to differentiate themselves from the authenticity-oriented hardcore punk generation at end of the eighties. Their ironic handling of political and masculinity-related themes in their “authenticity pictures” is still relevant for them today.

However, irony must be understood in order to be noticed. This was not always the case. At the beginning of their career, Fuckhead’s role as a projection surface often ended up being a bad call. The left-wingers found Fuckhead to be too right, the right-wing found them to be too gay, the underground felt they lacked political objectives, and for the art world, Fuckhead was too nonconformist to be integrated into either art theory circles or the art business.

[6:01 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

Fuckhead maintains a balance between music and performance. Some put more importance on their musical side, while others are particularly drawn to their visual side. In the midst of all the visual scenery, the physical body being pushed to its extremes has long been Fuckhead’s main act. With Bruckmayr being pulled from the chest by a hanging steel cable, the band had reached a limit, which left them wondering how to further position themselves. “We set ourselves up the last time to move on to something even more fantastical” commented the members of Fuckhead over the new adjustment. The public has embraced this change, along with the positive vibes and the adrenaline rush that Fuckhead embodies. This was especially the case at the Donaufestival in Krems, when the California body-art performer, Ron Athey, propelled fake pearls out of his ass, “paying tribute” to the European conquerors’ original “gift” to America. (wh/jn)

The scenes for this episode were shot at the Donaufestival Krems.

“Mankind” consists of two female artists. As in every other civilization, this one also has its prehistory. One half of Mankind is D. Kimm, a poet and musician originating from Montréal. Already before joining Mankind, Kimm was organizing literature festivals and was the leader of “Les Filles électriques”, which performed poetry in its written, spoken, and electronic forms. The other half of Mankind, Alexis O`Hara, a musician from Ottawa, was already examining the human condition through sound experimentation, Onomatopoea, and Poetry Slam performances.

Mankind performs live electronic sound samples, mixed with their own voices set to sound loops, poetic conversations, and spontaneously produced noise bytes, creating a kind of “sound cinema” rich with images, sounds and content. In their own words, Mankind describes themselves as a “supersonic cinema with a visual bonus”. The public gets a cinematic experience minus the rewind button. The improvisatorial character of their performances constantly creates something new to view and breaks through the glass fourth wall, which in conventional theatre, normally separates the art from the audience.

Mankind lives up to its name. The human condition is always the central theme in their productions. Lived and desired everyday scenarios are sketched out. What lies just under the surface of our mundane existence – whether concealed or revered – is revealed. Mankind scrutinizes “the good life”. Our prefabricated beauty and hardship gets visually exposed, improvisatorially explored, broken down, and, every now and then, destroyed. “We seek out Beauty as well as Trouble. We transcend the Palpable and the Impalpable. Our Weakness is our Strength.” Such is the artists’ manifesto. ” We are Mankind.”. (wh/jn)
The video of the episode was shot at the Donaufestival Krems.

The job description for Marten Spangberg encompasses many terms. He got his start as a dance critic, writes on theory, is active as a performer, dance dramaturge, a curator, and a choreographer, and is considered a stage producer in quite a positive sense. Spangberg has been collaborating with the Swedish architect, Lindstrand Tor, since 2004 under the name International Festival. Their collaborative work explores perceptions of concepts related to body and space, and has gained international attention. At the present and in the last year, they have been invited to the European Arts Center in Cologne, the PERFORMA 07 in New York, and the Steirischen Herbst 07. For the festival in Graz, they developed “The Theater”, a multi-faceted enterprise which simultaneously describes a venue for stories, characters, and illusions, the performances that take place there, and the actual spatially-adaptable theater that was constructed from freight containers.

Aside from his collaboration with Lindstrand Tor, Marten Spangberg also works as a solo artist. He experiments in performances with himself and with others. The tools of his work are the body in relation to the world and the way the body behaves in space. He is concerned with the different behavior patterns we embody: our self, our reality, our sociability, our wants…

[7:55 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

We interviewed Spangberg in the context of the event series, “NICHTS ist aufregend. NICHTS ist sexy. NICHTS ist nicht peinlich.” (“NOTHING is exciting. NOTHING is sexy. NOTHING is not awkward.”), being held at MOMUK and Tanzquartier Wien. His performance in the series, “Slow Fall”, is a sketch, an artistic draft of a work which will premiere in November 2008. In the context of this performance, Spangberg explores the different behavior patterns which we embody and moderate, and the possibility thereby of creating a new understanding for ourselves.

Spangberg takes on the statement “NOTHING is not awkward” and tries to find a term for awkwardness which corresponds to the artistic emphasis of his work on the relationships of the body to area and the body to the world. By positing awkwardness as a displacement, as a deliberate ill-at-ease, as a levitation, our embodiments of our interactions become free-floating, thereby allowing us to grab hold of how they interact with us. For the choreographic realization of this program, Spangberg borrowed from elements of eastern spiritual out-of-body experience techniques, but denies his audience the exhibition of a performance for which they would already have words. By rupturing the typical ways in which we embody physical propriety, Spangberg brings about a displacement through which, during the performance, his nakedness, which has not yet been articulated, is experienced by the audience under the new guise, and in the best sense, as an “ill-at-ease” experience. The audience cannot find the words, for words have in fact become disproportionate, to describe the experience. However, afterwards, somehow a little space is created, to separately determine one’s own proportions, and to use this experience of awkwardness to find one’s own words and to take up one’s own position. (wh/jn)

Under revolving pastry plates with star motifs, cut-outs from pictures of bygone eras appear. Shadows of hands form letters over photographs and textiles throw folds over 16-millimeter film loops, which gradually go up in flames. Rotary pumps from aquariums propel multicolored oil droplets on water surfaces in a circular motion, instrumental sounds get mixed in with vocal experiments.

Visual and acoustic echoes bounce off the walls, flowing, climbing, covering, and piling over microphones and slide, overhead, and rattling film projectors. The projected collective spectacle succeeds in flooding the viewer with an overflowing variety in the form of a broad audiovisual image, creating a kind of audiovisual synergy. 4shrooms consider themselves the participants of such audiovisual performances. What they have in common is innovation, experimentation, and analog collaboration.

[6:49 min] download for: mobile | computer & iPod | send feedback

The group, which includes Doris Steinbichler, Anna Graf, George Eisnecker, Jan von Krieg, Andi Punz, Amadeus Kronheim, Ruth Haselmair, and Asia Sumyk, do not only inundate the viewers with unusual projections, but they also always reveal the secrets behind their creations. Their visuals are performative and produced on location, often in the middle of the space: hands and equipment are fully exposed. One can go over and watch, and if the group is outnumbered, even participate. With the number of the visualizing participants in the group, the multilayered-ness of the projection work increases, but that is not only valid in regard to the visual result, but also in view of the social dimension of artistic cooperation. (wh/jn)