The Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, or Berlin Artists-in-Residence Program of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), is a prestigious residency program for international artists, writers, and filmmakers based in Berlin, Germany. DAAD 2004: Part I.
David Behrman:
1/ Pen Light 10:16
The installation Pen Light was first shown in 1998 at Studio Five Beekman in New York, a gallery founded by Michael Schumacher and Ursula Scherer as a space for intimate sound and multimedia installations. Its soundproof exhibition space—very small and usually pitch-black or dimly lit—was equipped with ten to fourteen wall- and ceiling-mounted speakers and covered with a thick carpet. The gallery could accommodate only a small handful of visitors at a time. Pen Light is an installation version of QS / RL, a series of interactive computer music pieces developed between 1993 and 1998 for concert performance by one or two musicians playing wind instruments. Instead of pitches played by musicians on instruments, the installation Pen Light uses computer-controlled fans, small flashlights, and a light-sensor console as interactive elements. The installation space is illuminated only by the light of flickering, swaying flashlights directed at shot glasses placed above a series of light sensors. The light refracted by the glasses influences the music generated by a computer music system in the adjacent room. The music slowly loops through the 16 pieces by QS / RL. Pen Light received an honorable mention at the 1998 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz.
2/ View Finder 09:51
In the sound installation View Finder, a video camera records movements in the exhibition space and then, in response to what it sees, subtly influences the character of the music playing. View Finder is an amalgam of very old and relatively new works, drawing on sources dating back to the early 1970s, namely two pieces that utilized home-built analog synthesizers: Pools of Phase Locked Loops (1972) and Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches (1973). Through its use of image recognition technology, View Finder also recalls Cloud Music, a collaboration with artist Robert Watts and video designer Bob Diamond. In View Finder, the sounds of the old home-built synthesizers are realized in software on a Macintosh laptop, while the visual component comes from a small desktop video camera. View Finder was first shown in November 2001 at Valerian Maly’s gallery in Cologne. Thanks to Ron Kuivila for his new version of VideoIn, a software module for image processing originally developed by Eric Singer.
Gordon Monahan:
3/ When It Rains 03:41
When It Rains is an environment with automated sound sculptures, consisting of 32 MIDI-controlled valves that drip water onto 24 hanging objects (small metal and plastic objects). A piezoelectric pickup is attached to each object. When a drop of water falls onto an object, the object’s resonance is amplified via a sound system (mixing console, amplifier, loudspeaker). The output signal of each pickup (symmetrically applied thanks to a special design) is assigned to a separate mixer channel. This allows each sound to be individually controlled; the partials of each object can be individually amplified. The water valves ‘play’ preprogrammed musical sequences. The sequences are composed of MIDI notes played in rhythmic sequences. The 40-millisecond pulse triggered by each note opens the corresponding valve for just long enough for a drop of water to form. This drop then falls about one to two meters and lands on the object hanging below.
4/ Danse Aquatique 03:22
5/ Etheric Theremin Harmonic 06:20
A theremin serves as an interactive tool for controlling the speed of various electric motors, which in turn stimulate harmonic vibrations in long piano strings and suspended metal sheets.
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Terriy Fox:
6/ Litanies of Interference 09:48
When two or more sound waves collide, “interference” occurs. A “litany” is a resonant or repetitive chant. These two terms provide the title and description for the installation, which is being realized in the hundred-year-old Oderberger Strasse public swimming pool in Berlin. In the boiler room, where the water was heated with coal, I will install several instruments made of various metal tubes of varying lengths and diameters. Each of these tubes will be powered by a butane gas flame. Depending on their respective lengths and diameters, the tubes will produce different continuous tones (standing waves). The mutual interference of these tones, as well as the acoustic properties of the room itself, will create various secondary and superficial tones. There is also a “sensitive flame.” This is a purely reactive flame whose shape changes depending on the acoustic phenomenon surrounding it. When sounds—clapping, whistling, etc.—occur near this flame, its pitch will decrease or increase accordingly. The flame is installed in a separate room in the swimming pool.
Robert Minard:
7/ SoundBits 01 08:50
Since the mid-1990s, I have used hundreds—in some cases thousands—of small loudspeakers in many of my sound installations, through which high-frequency audio material is played on up to 16 channels. This type of installation, in which simple audio signals are emitted from countless individual sources or across large surfaces, conveys a listening experience close to that found in nature. The visual arrangements of the loudspeakers in the installations also take on organic forms, immersing the observer in an interplay of perceptions of the familiar and the unfamiliar: what we perceive as natural and living, and what appears to us technical and artificial. SoundBits deepens my exploration of nature metaphors and expands the technical possibilities of working with a multitude of individual sound sources. The installation consists of 576 piezo loudspeakers installed in the empty swimming pool of the Oderberger Straße public pool in Berlin. By demultiplexing three 24-bit audio channels into 1-bit signals, each of the 576 loudspeakers becomes an independent sound source capable of producing simple 1-bit pulses, tones, and colored noises. The individual speakers behave similarly to pixels on a computer screen, allowing the projection of graphic and moving sound “images” onto the surface of the installation. To experience the work, the audience is invited to descend into the empty swimming pool. The SoundBits project was developed at IRCAM in Paris between 2001 and 2002. SoundBits 01 – the premiere of this project – was commissioned by Inventionen 2002.
Hannah Leonie Prinzler:
8/ _[’d∧zn] 05:01
The installation _[’d zn] creates an atmosphere of sound and light that the visitor activates upon entering the space. Three glass plates hang from the ceiling, with 12 wine glasses on them. Vibrations cause the plates to oscillate acoustically and visually: Sounds are created when the glasses shake and when the material collides; simultaneously, this causes the transparent UV liquid in the cups to move. The black light makes this movement visible. The real sounds blend with sound material from inside the wine glasses. The patches of light in the room and the interplay of the sounds continuously change.
Ludger Hennig:
09/ eisen fern 10:14
… it must be something very quiet, a distant, untouched, dreamy world that embraces you as soon as you approach it… 6 steel plates, each equipped with a transducer, are played with sounds, creating different, homogeneous soundscapes that sometimes move together, sometimes independently, against each other, flow into each other, and create something new…
10/ pocessed canon of David Behrman’s Pen light.
Inventions 2002
Berlin Festival of New Music
June 26 – July 7, 2002
© 2004 DAAD
PFAU-Verlag and authors
ISBN-3-89727-259-8
LC 08864
GEMA
