The Museum of Contemporary Art presents a solo exhibition by Jan St. Werner, a researcher, sound artist, and composer of electronic music, titled Vibraception – Investigations in Wavespace. The exhibition transforms the museum space into a sound environment, using sound as a tool to activate both space and architecture. Precisely directed sound waves shape the environment, creating dynamic soundscapes that change depending on the movement of the visitors. Within the interior of the Museum, panels are installed that, by directing sound waves, create unpredictable resonances and changes in the perception of the building’s architecture, building upon the interactive sound panels of the author’s Excitatory Yards work displayed on the MSU plateau in September 2024.

Based on Werner’s concept of vibraception, which emphasizes that reality and memory exist in constant interplay, much like the source of sound and its echo, which merge and replace each other, the exhibition explores sound as vibration in dialogue with reality, perception, and memory. It explores how sound shapes our experience and relationship with space and time. In this process, sound does not merely appear as a result of air vibrations, but as a means of exploration in which sound sources and their echoes constantly intertwine and change. Memory plays a key role in this process: it acts like a sound echo, never holding stable form, but continuously reshaping itself through new layers of memories, experiences, and contexts. Thus, like sound in space, memory is constantly reassembled, and the boundary between source and echo becomes indistinguishable. Within this conceptual framework, the exhibition at MSU becomes a field of vibrations, where visitors are immersed in spatial-sound conditions that confuse the senses, erase linear cause-and-effect relationships, and encourage a different way of listening to and perceiving space and reality.

Werner first presented the concept of vibraception at MSU in September 2024, in the form of the Vibraceptional Plate, a vibrating installation located on the southern plateau near the main entrance to the Museum. The plate, created for the research project SONCITIES at the University of Oxford, serves as both a vibrating structure and a platform for exploring the perception of vibrations – vibraception. The project stems from Werner’s long-standing interest in sound and its effect on space, with his anarchic architectures using sound and psychoacoustics to challenge traditional architectural forms.

Throughout the duration of the exhibition, there will be performances, experimental presentations, and a discursive program, as well as a publication promotion featuring theoretical texts, short concepts, interviews, artistic collages, and contributions from prominent experts and theorists in sound, vibrations, architecture, and space.

Curator: Ana Škegro

Light design and programming: Matthias Singer, Yul Zeser

Engineer support: Michael Akstaller, Jan Bernstein, Rudyard Schmidt

Technical support: Dalibor Cicvara, Renato Mihaljenović, Aleksandar Milošević, Silvio Strelar, Ivan Tudek, Filip Zima

Fotos: Sanja Bistričić Srića

http://www.msu.hr/dogadanja/jan-st-werner-vibraception-investigations-in-wavespace/1659/en.html

Axiomatic Rhythmicry is predicated on generative spatial relationality. Unlike classical rhythm, which conforms to preconfigured temporal grids, this system treats rhythm as a construct within variable dimensions. Operating through nodes and interstices, Axiomatic Rhythmicry generates spatial multiplicities, rejecting binary symmetry. Its emergent behavior reflects organic and cognitive processes, proposing a multidimensional framework in which sonorous probability supplants compositional rigidity.
The foundational premise of Axiomatic Rhythmicry is that rhythm operates not as a series of temporally discrete events, but as a principle of dynamic spatial interrelations. Rhythm is constructed through a multivalent logic that transcends classical dichotomies such as accent vs. gap or presence vs. absence. Node-States represent contextualized intensities within the spatial domain, where each node is an autonomous unit. Their spatial activity is constrained only by the recursive logic of the system itself.
Unlike rational systems, which resolve towards homeostasis, Axiomatic Rhythmicry destabilizes linear temporalities, producing complex streams of diverging event configurations. These streams bifurcate within multidimensional context-situations, creating topologies of potentially infinite bifurcations, overlaps, or divergences.
Axiomatic Rhythmicry feeds off recursive node activity. Grains consolidate into pulse, pulse into vibration, and vibrational activity defines space, which in turn informs node actions. Space becomes a network of potentialities, embodying generative transformation. Thus, an agglutinated structure evolves—a recursive engine whose axiomatic logic unfolds unbridled within the spatial-temporal domain.
By rejecting the constraints of linearity and metricity, Axiomatic Rhythmicry introduces rhythm as a potential of spatial associations: an abstract engine that operates not to resolve but to evolve, generating complexity that transcends logical frameworks. Axiomatic Rhythmicry is alive in its resistance to completion.

https://fiepblatter.bandcamp.com/album/axiomatic-rhythmicry

Music Jan St. Werner
Artwork Frieda Luczak
Mastering Zino Mikorey

Jan St. Werner

acid-metric

Three sound-producing objects in three locations.

https://ebensperger.net/werner-acid-metric

But rather it is all one location; the sound is present throughout the entirety of the space of the exhibition. These three works each have their own distinct character as regards sound: the dense-spectra drones of Reflector (a detail that sticks with me: a fade out that’s suggestive of the final expulsion of air from lungs, bellows, or bagpipes); the elevated, untiring, unforgiving machinic pulse of Assel (threatening to trigger Diana Deutsch-style aural illusions); and the comparatively lyrical, wildcard assaying of Wolpertinger (mercurial gesture and incident that arguably has the most to say and ties up the three-part assemblage with a bow).

Metal, concrete, wood: a bracing volume level makes the most of this oddly proportioned space and the echoing surfaces of its walls. I find myself rubbernecking to identify the source of a particular sound and realize that what I’m hearing is primarily reflection. (The reflection becomes the source.)

The objects themselves are fully themselves, polished metal or wood painted black, and assuming pride of place. There are no hidden speakers in this exhibition. For an encounter seemingly predicated on the experience of sound, the objects themselves invite close inspection with their subtle assymetries and refusal of parallelism, no two sides the same.

The sound materials, if you must? Until the membrane or horn of the speakers are activated, it’s data. The source is generated via software, engages electronic circuitry, and the speakers then transfer energy to the medium of air, with unique results in a sound environment ever in flux.

—
The moment of exchange
in which it becomes manifest
“the other that you would not want to hide” (JW).

Text David Grubbs

Thank you Rudy Schmidt, Jan Bernstein, Marcin Pietruszewski

Photos Sebastian Weise

19.11 – 21.12.2024
EBENSPERGER
Fichtebunker, Fichtestraße 6, 10967 Berlin

office@ebensperger.net

vibraception: excitatory yards and vibraceptional plate

Excitatory Yards

Participatory Public Space Installation For Two Rotatable Speaker Panels And Electronic Sound

With his two experimental sound stations, Excitatory Yards, Jan St. Werner allows the architecture of MSU to be perceived in a conscious and unconventional 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 set in rotation by a visitor, triggering different directional sound signals and thus creating the opportunity to acoustically experience and explore MSU and its surroundings at different sound frequencies. In addition, the ear itself is activated and phantom sounds emerge.

The environments of the two sound situations – a small, enclosed one in front of MSU and a large one behind the museum 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.

Jan St. Werner with Michael Akstaller, Thomas Richter, Oliver Mayer, Marcin Pietruszewski

Vibraceptional Plate

Commissioned by the SONCITIES research project at the University of Oxford, the Vibraceptional Plate serves both as a vibrating structure and a platform for investigating vibrational perception, which Jan St. Werner refers to as ‘vibraception.’ This project stems from St. Werner’s long-standing interest in sound as a spatial practice and his creation of anarchic architectures that use sound and psychoacoustics to challenge traditional architectural forms. The Vibraceptional Plate extends St. Werner’s collaboration with SONCITIES in exploring the potential of vibrational architectures—those that prioritize vibrational phenomena, including audible and inaudible sound, seismic waves, and mechanical waves—to disrupt and reorient architectural thinking.

Workshops connected to the Vibraceptional Plate will be conducted by a group of local and international scholars for architecture and art students in Zagreb, who will be invited to imagine what a vibrational architecture could be. These students will design new vibrational architectures, which will be shared on the SONCITIES website (soncities.org) and in future publications. As a participatory public artwork, the Vibraceptional Plate invites anyone to create, experiment, and explore the realm of vibrations and wavespace.

The Vibraceptional Plate is being exhibited for the first time at the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb, as part of the exhibition ‘Vibraception: Investigations in Wavespace,’ curated by Ana Škegro. It was conceived by Jan St. Werner and built by Michael Akstaller.

Concept and design: Jan St. Werner
Engineer: Michael Akstaller
Commissioned by: Gascia Ouzounian/SONCITIES
Curator: Ana Škegro
Workshop conveners: Jan St. Werner, Nikola Bojić, Brett Mommersteeg, Gascia Ouzounian, Ana Škegro
Sponsor: European Research Council (no. 865032)
Acknowledgements: Damir Gamulin, Polly Nuttgens, Rudy Schmidt, Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford

Fotos by Sanja Bistričić Srića

The Vibraceptional Plate is funded by SONCITIES project which is a research initiative that explores the relationship between sound, urban environments, and architectural design. Based at the University of Oxford, the project investigates how sound can be used as a medium to rethink and reshape urban spaces and architectural practices. Led by Gascia Ouzounian, SONCITIES focuses on understanding how sound influences the way we experience cities and how it can be harnessed to create more dynamic, inclusive, and responsive urban environments.

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the project Sonorous Cities: Towards a Sonic Urbanism (grant agreement No 865032). Supported and co-produced by Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, Zagreb.

The Vibraception exhibition is realized with the financing of the City of Zagreb and the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia.

http://www.msu.hr/dogadanja/vibracepcija-dvorista-uzbudljivosti-i-vibracepcijska-ploca/1565/en.html

Der Springende Punkt is a continuously changing radio piece, a restless entanglement with the world and time, composed of excerpts from radio documents from the archives of Deutschlandradio and ORF. Rosa Barba and Jan St. Werner have made a selection of literary contributions, music, jingles, interviews and presentations and made them available to an AI as source material. The computer rearranges the sounds in real time and combines them into new compositions. The material is constantly condensed through new juxtapositions, revivals of our memories and cultural productions over time. The composition is created as part of the KONTINUUM series by Deutschlandfunk Kultur and ORF Sound Art.

With Bruno Gola & Constantin Carstens

https://www.hoerspielundfeature.de/kontinuum-der-springende-punkt-100.html

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

Curated by Çağla Ilk

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 took place in Venice from April 20 to November 24, 2024. The commissioner was the ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.

https://deutscher-pavillon.org/en

Fotos Deutscher Pavillon / Thomas Aurin

Video Joseph Kadow

The New Alphabet, Volume 21 

A publication series by HKW Berlin

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)

SR005
SAVVY records 2024

https://savvy-contemporary.com/en/pillars/savvy-records/sometimes-you-just-have-to-give-it-your-attention/

order: savvyrecords@savvy-contemporary.com

https://www.kulturstiftung-des-bundes.de/en/programmes_projects/music_and_sound/detail/sometimes_you_just_have_to_give_it_your_attention.html

Jan St. Werner

Excitation Resonance

Ebensperger Berlin

15.09.–11.11.2023

Fichtebunker, Fichtestraße 6, 10967 Berlin

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.

Werner: Excitation Resonance

Excitatory Yards, 2023

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.

https://www.bundeskunsthalle.de/en/interactions.html

Video by Frank Buchholz

The Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry and the Serralves Museum present:

A Terra Compartilhada Summer School

Collaborative Experimentation in Sound

Faculty: David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner 

David Grubbs and Jan St. Werner lead participants in multidisciplinary explorations of sound, body, and space, combining traditional and theoretical knowledge with hands-on experimentation in using sound as an art form. How can we approach sound as something other than morphology or sign? What happens when we bracket musical aesthetics?

Participants in this hybrid workshop/seminar are guided through a process of collaborative research and critical and creative production, with five days of instruction culminating in a public event that combines performances, readings, demonstrations, and discussions. A fundamental orientation for these collaborative efforts are that everyone does everything on the understanding that the most fruitful collaborations occur when individuals are able to gain practical experience of every relevant mode of production. Readings, viewings, and listenings are assigned both prior to and during the workshop, and provide artistic and theoretical reference points for work and discussions. Writing, both individual and collaborative, is prominently featured, especially with a view toward language as sonic material and practice.

https://theisci.org/course13.html

https://theisci.org/course11.html

https://theisci.org/course6.html

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

Jan St. Werner

ISBN: 978-3-7757-5576-4

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.

Chapel of Serralves Villa

Serralves Foundation Porto

02 JUN – 24 SEP 2023

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.

May 05 – July 02, 2023

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.

https://kunsthalle-baden-baden.de/programm/jan-st-werner-space-synthesis

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:

• Lecture PerformancesMit Michael Akstaller, Nina Emge, Gascia Ouzounian, Marcin Pietruszewski und Patricia Reed
• Spaint Chords in Public SpacesPerformance im öffentlichen Raum mit Jan St. Werner, Eva Borrmann, Michael Akstaller, Elise Ludinard, Rudyard Schmidt und Silja Beck
• PercuspectionPerformance der Künstler Dodo NKishi und Tunde Alibaba
• Thresholds and Echoes: On Migrant ListeningVortrag des Autors und Wissenschaftlers Louis Chude-Sokei
• Katalogvorstellung Space SynthesisKatalogvorstellung mit Jan St. Werner, Çağla Ilk und Louis Chude-Sokei
• more-than-human performativity, vibrational spaces membranesPerformance der Künstlerin Nicole L’Huillier
• Online-Symposium syntheticspace.deMit Jan St. Werner, Çağla Ilk, Nikola Bojić, Damir Gamulin, Goran Sergej Pristaš, Lins Derry

The exhibition is accompanied by an LP and a catalogue:

Jan St. Werner

The digital dimension of the exhibition was developed by Damir Gamulin and Nikola Bojić. Digital Curator: Dominik Busch.

http://syntheticspace.de/

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden
Lichtentaler Allee 8 a
76530 Baden-Baden

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

Production: David Johannes Meyer

Set up in Serralves: Constantin Carstens

https://www.serralves.pt/en/atividades-serralves/diana-deutsch-phantom-words-spatial-in-collaboration-with-jan-st-werner/

https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2021/the_sound_of_distance/start.php

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, Lenbachhaus Munich and Kunsthaus Nürnberg.

Fotos Lukas Pürmayr, Jan St. Werner