Under the title Thresholds, the German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024 narrates history and the future from various artistic positions. Thresholds stands for the present as a place where no one can stay and that only exists because one thing has occurred and another still awaits. For people with biographies characterized by migration, the temporal perception of the present as a threshold between the retrospective and the prospective is paired with a fundamental spatial and physical experience of living at the intersection of different belongings.
Artists of the German Pavillon and Island of Certosa: Yael Bartana, Ersan Mondtag, Michael Akstaller, Nicole L’Huillier, Robert Lippok, Jan St. Werner
For Volumes Inverted, Jan St. Werner developed a loudspeaker instrument for the monastic ruin on La Certosa. Its dialogue with another loudspeaker, which focuses a beam of sound from the lagoon over several hundred meters back to the island, gives rise to two interlocking sound installations: one activating the monastery’s interior, the other distributing sound across the island. This duality questions one’s own localization and prompts an interchange between the island and the surrounding lagoon.
The 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia takes place in Venice from April 20 to November 24, 2024. The contribution for the German Pavilion is curated by Çağla Ilk, the commissioner is the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.
Editors: Detlef Diederichsen, Arno Raffeiner, Jan St. Werner
Publisher: Spector Books
90 pages, German and English edition
Color illustrations, paperback with folded dust cover
ISBN DE: 978-3-95905-657-1
ISBN EN: 978-3-95905-658-8
Price: 10 €
People perceive audio events in very different ways. There is still a great deal of uncertainty about the physics, biology, signifiers and unconscious processes on the basis of which auditory experiences are constructed. The book applies the methods of artistic research to convey a sense of how mental space, social practice and the direct experience of sound relate to each other and how connections are generated between these levels – a topology of resonances, reflections and vibrations in perpetual motion.
With contributions by J.-P. Caron and Patricia Reed, Diana Deutsch and Marc Matter, Tim Johnson, Vera Molnar, Gascia Ouzounian, Matana Roberts and David Grubbs as well as Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
Table of contents:
Introduction – Detlef Diederichsen, Arno Raffeiner, Jan St. Werner
Listening to Unencoded Worlds – J.-P. Caron and Patricia Reed
“A strange woman had entered the room and begun to sing” – Diana Deutsch and Marc Matter in Conversation
This somewhere that is still moving – Tim Johnson
View from the Balcony – Matana Roberts and David Grubbs in Conversation
Becoming Air: On Sonic Spatial Metaphysics – Gascia Ouzounian
The Body as Sound, the Sound as Body – Paolo Thorsen-Nagel
With graphic works by Vera Molnar courtesy DAM Projects
Louis Chude-Sokei, Hani Mojtahedy, Yara Mekawei, Mendi & Keith Obadike, Gascia Ouzounian, DAF (Dynamische Akustische Forschung), Michael Akstaller, Jan St. Werner
What do spaces that have shaped history sound like? Do we dare reimagine such histories and spaces through listening, especially those that are rooted in state violence and terror? What happens when we listen to complicated spaces together and explore our individual responses by listening to our listening?
These are the questions that shaped a diverse, international group of listeners into a collective that dared to listen to the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, Germany and respond to their collective listening via sound. This recording features those responses, which used the site as inspiration as well as raw sonic materials to build these sound pieces. Included also is a booklet with essays contextualizing the overall project as well as the distinct sonic responses.
Sometimes You Just Have to Give it Your Attention features author Louis Chude-Sokei, scholar/violinist Gascia Ouzounian, sound artists Yara Mekawei, Jan St. Werner, and Mendi and Keith Obadike, and iconic singer Hani Mojtahedy.
Project initiated by Jan St. Werner & Michael Akstaller Realized by DAF (Dynamische Akustische Forschung), Gascia Ouzounian, Hani Mojtahedy, Louis Chude-Sokei, Mendi & Keith Obadike, Yara Mekawei Essays by Gascia Ouzounian Louis Chude-Sokei Artwork by Paul Wick Project Management by Veronika Wagner
The project was realized with the support by Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Bewerbungsbüro Kulturhauptstadt Europas 2025 Stadt Nürnberg, European Research Council, SONCITIES project (No. 865032)
For Ebensperger’s first exhibition at its new gallery spaces, electronic music artist and composer Jan St. Werner sonically activates Fichtebunker with custom built loudspeaker instruments beaming electronic sounds through a sequence of resonating chambers.
Participatory Space Synthesis Installation For Two Rotatable Speaker Panels And Electronic Sound
With Michael Akstaller, Thomas Richter, Oliver Mayer, Marcin Pietruszewski
With his two experimental sound stations, Excitatory Yards, Jan St. Werner allows the architecture of the Bundeskunsthalle to be perceived in a conscious and different way, as the installation functions as an acoustic amplification of the building and the outdoor space in dialogue with the visitors.
A single loudspeaker is actively rotated by visitors, triggering different sounds and creating the opportunity to acoustically experience and explore the Bundeskunsthalle in the inner courtyard and its surroundings on the museum forecourt at different sound frequencies. In addition, the ear itself is activated and phantom sounds can emerge. The work combines three important aspects of the phenomena of sound and hearing: Sound generation, impulse response of the environment and interpretation of the human perceptual apparatus. The artist thus invites an experiential construction of visual and acoustic spaces in which the visitor is not only an observer but also a protagonist of this ‘spatial synthesis installation’.
The environments of the two ‘courtyards’ – a small, enclosed one (inner courtyard) and a large, open one (museum forecourt) – are co-actors in a composition. This includes the two spaces as well as the deliberately disparate experiential movements of the visitors. Although the two ‘courtyards’ are part of an overall architectural concept, they are too far apart to be experienced simultaneously and together. As visitors explore them, they become intertwined: One remembers certain sounds, reflections, and perspectives and links them to the experiences of the slightly more distant surroundings; in individual perception, sound and environmental coordinates come together.
A greater awareness of the architecture, the space, and one’s own acoustic and visual experience in a game of distance and proximity is an essential part of the work.
Edited by: Çağla İlk, Jan St. Werner Texts by: Michael Akstaller, Nikola Bojić, Louis Chude-Sokei, Damir Gamulin, Çağla İlk, Gascia Ouzounian, Patricia Reed, Jan St. Werner, Oswald Wiener Graphic Design: Rupert Smyth German, English 2023, 252 Pages, 60 Ills. Paperback with flaps 235mm x 210mm
How can one inhabit a sound? What perspectives open up through the encounter of space, resonance and perception? And how are participants changed in the process? With Space Synthesis, artist and composer Jan St. Werner, known as one half of the duo Mouse on Mars, designs a radically new understanding of sound and space. The interplay between the two becomes a method of exploring architecture and social contexts.
Space Synthesis is the catalog for Jan St. Werner’s first solo exhibition and, at the same time, the document of a practice that turns against seemingly fixed knowledge and explores the productive power of sound from multiple perspectives. Numerous contributions deepen the understanding of his artistic work.
Jan St. Werner’s (*1969, Nuremberg) sound works always refer to an exchange with the visual arts. Werner has realized sound interventions and exhibitions in the context of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Lenbachhaus in Munich and at the 6th Ural Biennial. Werner has taught at the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in Boston, and the New York University Tisch School of the Arts in Berlin.
This sound installation offers an auditory experience of spatial depth via distance. You see the height of the staircase and instantaneously understand that the noises and voices from the ground floor are reflected above its height and back down to the ground floor. In addition, new sounds are created along the way: artifacts, echoes, resonances and distortions. The proximity and immediacy of listening to this auditory scene via headphones makes comparability plausible: “Where is the location of the sound that I’m hearing? How close is it to me? How far apart are Original and Echo? How do my interpretations the sound? How many layers does one sound consist of? Is a sound essentially shaped by its surroundings? Does each listener construct their own acoustic space?”
The staircase of Serralves Chapel becomes an instrument that creates, filters and colors sound. The association with our ear canal is obvious, because depending on the incoming frequencies, it shapes acoustic signals and even produces them itself. Through listening we explore our surroundings as an ever permeable reality which we actively alter and perform.
With Space Synthesis, St. Werner transforms the Kunsthalle into a sound space, a large instrument. The exhibition embarks on a dynamic investigation of human thought about sound by assuming that each of us perceives sounds differently. Between different sound sources and sound-reflecting surfaces, a stage – continuously changing in size and shape – is created. Sounds, shadows, walls, performers, and listeners become part of a moving, multi-perspective scenario.
Sound is usually understood as a medium of representation, a portrayal or interpretation of a source. In Space Synthesis, however, sound is a method of exploration and the Kunsthalle its subject. Supported by light, movements, distractions, and interventions, a parkour through the exhibition is created in which each room represents a separate section of a composition that is altered by the movements of each individual visitor.
Space Synthesis conceives of space not as a static object, but as a multiplicity of perspectives that are intertwined and react to each other. The careful use of light creates an immaterial architecture that intervenes in the space, but can also dynamically change itself. Thus, the space is constantly in motion, in dialogue with the visitors. By intervening in the structural design of the Kunsthalle, resonances are created that make the building speak. Sounds blend and combine, each frequency in the space creates new frequencies, each echo generates new echoes depending on where in the space the listener is located. Architectural elements are positioned at certain points that have a diffusing effect and divide the space in an invisible but audible way.
Dialogue and exchange play a central role in Werner’s investigation of the relationship between sound and space. Only they make it possible to rethink space, sound, senses, and not least ourselves. Space Synthesis is thus also a practice that opposes the notion of history as fixed knowledge, often manifested in monuments and rigid structures. This practice counters singular monumental thinking and static histories with multiple perspectives and a dynamic interdependence of the senses.
For Jan St. Werner, this approach is a logical continuation of his many years of work as a musician and composer. His first solo exhibition is not designed as a retrospective, but was conceived specifically for the spaces of the Kunsthalle. Curator Çağla Ilk is thus continuing a curatorial concept that she established when she took over the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in 2020 together with Misal Adnan Yıldız. Instead of merely exhibiting art, the Kunsthalle becomes a vivid oeuvre in itself in which art and architecture coalesce in a transdisciplinary manner. Ilk thus resumes a long tradition of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, which recurrently dismissed familiar exhibition concepts in favor of an examination of the building, for example in exhibitions by artists such as Donald Judd and Dan Flavin in the late 1980s.
Curated by Çağla İlk
Curatorial Assistance: Sandeep Sodhi
Speaker design and exhibition realization: Michael Akstaller
Light: Matthias Singer
Exhibition architecture: Jan St. Werner, Michael Akstaller with Bilge Kalfa
Art Direction: Rupert Smyth
Video: Joseph Kadow
On three weekends in May and June, the exhibition was enhanced by an extensive para-curatorial program with performances and lectures by many artists and theorists:
Diana Deutsch in collaboration with Jan St. Werner
“Our ability to recognize speech is amazing. We can recognize words and phrases that are produced by different speakers – including those using dfferent dialects – and we can also recognize words that are produced by the same speakers when they are in different emotional states. But to achieve this, we need to draw on an enormous store of knowledge, and also on our beliefs and expectations, to make inspired guesses as to what is being said. But this very process of guesswork can also lead us to perceive phantom words and phrases that are not, in reality, being spoken.
Some years ago, I discovered a way to produce a large number of phantom words and phrases in a short time. Sit in front of two loudspeakers, with one to your left and the other to your right. You will hear a sequence that consists of two words, or a single word that is composed of two syllables, and these are presented over and over again. The same repeating sequence is presented from both loudspeakers, but off – set in time so that when the first sound (word or syllable) is coming from the speaker on your right, the second sound is coming from the speaker on your left; and vice versa. Because the signals are mixed in the air before they reach your ears, you are given a palette of sounds from which to choose, and so can create in your mind many combinations of sounds.
On listening to a phantom word sequence, you initially hear a jumble of meaningless sounds. But later, distinct words and phrases suddenly appear. Those that seem to be coming from the speaker on your right are usually different from those that appear from the speaker on your left. Then still later, new words and phrases appear. If you wander around the room when these sounds are playing, you will likely hear new words and phrases. These illusions show that when people believe they are hearing meaningful messages, their brains are actively reconstructing sounds that make sense to them.
For this special installation I am following an invitation of Jan St. Werner to diffuse the phantom words via several loudspeakers. The audience can thus navigate between the various sound sources and add new layers of interpretation depending on their position within the acoustic field. The dynamics of continuously shifting listening perspectives activate the listener’s ears own senso-motoric system and make playful use of the reactions and reverberations of the architecture in which the installation is placed. Eight new phantom words were composed for this edition.” — Diana Deutsch, October 2021
In this performative tape composition custom-built loudspeaker panels emit five continually shifting frequency bands in narrow sonic beams. The panels are handheld by five performers who choreograph their movements to allow for exchanges between their frequencies and to evoke acoustic responses from the surrounding room. The piece mixes electronically generated material with recordings of instruments including saxophone by Mats Gustafsson, bagpipes by Erwan Keravec, percussion by Dirk Rothbrust and electronics by Jan St. Werner. The speaker panels were built by Michael Akstaller. Composition, in this performance, also means an exploration of space through sounds in motion.
“Spaint Chords” premiered in April at the opening of the German Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale comissioned by Maria Eichhorn. In addition it was performed at Cukrarna Ljubljana, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and Lenbachhaus Munich.
David Grubbs and Jan St. Wernermet in the mid-1990s when Grubbs was playing with Gastr del Sol and the Red Krayola and St. Werner in Mouse on Mars and Microstoria. After years of exchanging ideas, they’ve finally begun locking horns as a duo, with live appearances and a full-length album on Blue Chopsticks on the horizon. Steel yourself for a winding corridor of electronic fanfares and spontaneous musical miniatures threatening to grow wings and graduate into song.
David Grubbs has released fourteen solo albums. He was a member of the groups Gastr del Sol,Bastro, and Squirrel Bait and has performed with Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Luc Ferrari, Will Oldham, Loren Connors, the Red Krayola, Royal Trux, and many others.
Jan St. Werner is an artist and electronic music composer best known as one half of the group Mouse on Mars. He has collaborated with Oval’s Markus Popp as Microstoriaand written music for installations and films by visual artist Rosa Barba. Recently his work has prioritized installation and interventions with spatialized sound, including a number of collaborations under the name Dynamische Akustische Forschung (DAF).
The Space Academy follows its own principles of knowledge production via oral exchange and a non-hierarchical application of technology. Its research is based on dialogue. Knowledge acquisition follows the particularities of each given topic. There are no standards or written rules of how to navigate other than dialogical exchange which will be documented in various media. Each new member joins on the basis of trust of previous members. Members extend and verify the navigational perspectives of the Space Academy and are therefore navigators. A main concern of the space academy is the orientation through space via sound. Sound is defined as a quest itself: a phenomenon of continuous sending and receiving, of activation and interpretation. the academy has no local center. It moves. Everyone who contributes knowledge navigates. The academy starts with one collectively framed question which continuously generates new perspectives while research is performed.
The participants of this hybrid seminar & workshop will be introduced to artistic concepts of how to work with sound as a non-hierarchical mode for alternative reality conceptions. The workshop is not about music production but a different sensing of spatial dynamics through sound. We will engage in listening sessions, initiate field recording trips, develop strategies of collective performing and reflect on practice and theory. The workshop aims at experience without neglecting critical reflection and conceptual framing.
Fotos Cukrarna by Petra Cvelbat
Fotos Museum of Modern Art Zagreb by Sanja Bistricic
Jan St. Werner isa founding member of the music group Mouse on Mars and releases solo work on his own Fiepblatter Catalogue. St. Werner has been a visiting lecturer at MIT’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) and served as Professor for Interactive Art and Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academies of Fine Arts Nuremberg and Munich.
Michael Akstaller studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, at the HfG Karlsruhe and civil engineering at the Nuremberg University of Technology. His research focus are spatial perception via directed sound sources in sound installations, interactions between hydrodynamics and morphological processes in fluids and pure acoustic phenomena. Together with Jan St. Werner, he initiated the Class for Dynamic Acoustic Research at AdBK Nuremberg, which is now operating as an independent artist collective.
April 24-28 CUKRARNA Poljanski nasip 40 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia
With this solo exhibition of electronic musician Jan St. Werner, the idea is to put audio at the forefront, positioning it at the same level as visual work within the framework of digital art. The nine compositions that make up Polyarrythmia—which can be taken as a set of sound works, a performance, an exhibition, an album—are being released as NFTs through Feral File, available both as individual compositions and a full set. Here’s St. Werner on Polyarrythmia, in his own words:
“Polyarrythmia is an album or an exhibition or a selection of pieces, or maybe just a narrative in sound. None of the compositions have a strict metronome; there is no click or clock. The album as a whole has these interlocking peaks, micro-moments and movements, and then larger arcs, which meet and then disperse. To me that is very much what rhythm is, thus the name Polyarrythmia.
“The compositions were mastered to be as present and intense as possible. The actual files that people download when they collect will provide the maximum resolution that people will be able to play back. I’m happy for listeners to experience the compositions separately, but to me, Polyarrythmia is a set, it’s a narrative as a whole. The pieces were all constructed in relation to each other, based on a visionary brain space, let’s call it. I was thinking, how far can I let these things drift off? How much space can I give it to unfold and go its own way? When I draw it back, that’s what becomes an individual composition or a piece.
“I think that when we work in the field of art, or creating, it’s a manifestation of thoughts. The tool that you use to make these thoughts manifest might be animation, or it might be paint, or graphics. Or the thoughts might translate into sound—sound that changes drastically, or holds a certain vibrational moment. I think of these decisions as a necessity or a convention, which is sometimes put upon us. I don’t think anyone who works, let’s say, in the field of visual arts thinks only visually, or in the field of sound arts thinks only in audio. The output is an expression of an artist’s thoughts, emotions, and connections—how you respond to the world, and how you feed those thoughts back into your world.
“What’s really interesting about working in this field of digital art is not that I’m especially interested in the aesthetics of the digital or the futuristic. For me, it’s more of an expression of intuitively interfacing with the world with the means you have at hand. With NFTs, there’s a new possibility for doing that, and there’s an intensity and sensuality to it, interfacing with direct call-and-response modes of communicating with the world and other humans. We can call it poetic, or experimental, or critical. We can call it interfering, bonding: us becoming some of that new technology, or that new technology feeding deeper into our neural-networks, maybe eventually becoming fully, intuitively performable without any physical restrictions at all. The digital realm is also a territory of unprecedented surveillance and manipulation, so we need to formulate how we want to push up against that, build alternatives, parallel strains, add bifurcations, and openings to the code.”
If HKW were one big instrument, what would it sound like? The four-day festival The Sound of Distance takes this question seriously and seeks answers in the expanded resonance chamber of concerts, performances, talks and sonic activations, indoors and outdoors, in a radius that includes the carillon in the neighboring bell tower and the echo of the surrounding government buildings.
Curated by Jan St. Werner and HKW
Sound significantly determines the spatial perception of things and events. Sound waves are constantly in motion. The Sound of Distance makes it possible to experience them over different distances. Artists present works – some conceived especially for the festival – between guitar drones and cello sounds, sound installations and works by avant-garde composers like Annea Lockwood and Alvin Lucier. Much can be experienced by audience members in individual rhythms, with their own accents and intensities – whether the sounds reach all the way to the Bundestag or arise as otoacoustic emissions directly in the inner ear. Thus, along with acoustic perceptions, The Sound of Distance also sharpens the sense of personal location. Creating new configurations of human and object, visible and invisible, proximity and distance.
With Alvin Lucier, Andrea Belfi, Annea Lockwood, Anthea Caddy, crys cole, David Grubbs, Diana Deutsch, Dirk Rothbrust, Dodo NKishi & Tunde Alibaba, Dynamische Akustische Forschung, Hani Mojtahedy & Andi Toma, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Jan St. Werner, Judith Hamann, Louis Chude-Sokei, Marcin Pietruszewski, Maurice de Martin, Oren Ambarchi, Patricia Reed & J.-P. Caron, Sam Auinger & Katrinem, Sam Dunscombe, Stephen O’Malley, Wibke Deertz, Zwerm
Squares Will Fall is a multidirectional loudspeaker choreography performed by three acrobats of the Ekaterinburg Circus. Three elements of the composition are played via three loudspeakers hanging from the circus ceiling. The performers mix the sound elements in real time by moving the speakers. The audience is free to change position during the performance and also make audio recordings for personal use.
Sound features feataures Justin Vernon, Uma Barba, John Colpitts, Zach Condon, Mats Gustafsson, Hilary Jeffrey, Ben Lanz, Dodo NKishi, Kyle Resnick, Jeremy Ylvisaker
Performed by Danil Balakin, Sergey Fedorenko, Denis Karpov
Production: Anastasia Dergousova, Alexander Tkhomirov, Nikita Shvalev, Natasha Andreeva
A resonating bass frequency on floor one is the basis for Jan St. Werner’s sound piece. Werner responds to the continuous swell and decay of the busy traffic noise that surrounds the tower by adjusting two sine wave oscillators to its unstable metrics. One sine wave is played through one of two open holes in the ceiling facing downwards into the first floor of the building. The second sine wave is played through the second hole facing upwards into floor two. The two signals overlap and create circulating sound patterns that activate and connect the spacious floors of the tower.
Thank you Nikita Shvalev, Michael Akstaller, Cagla Ilk
