STEIM Jamboree 25.02.2010 #1: Hans Koch and Yutaka Makino
As a kick-off to the Sonic Acts festival of 2010, STEIM arranged a Jamboree session including talks on the two artists, Hans Koch and Yutaka Makino, engaging with theme of this year, The Poetics of Space. STEIM’s largest studio provided a setting for the listenership of researchers, professionals and those interested, with Koch and Makino talking about their work and the pieces they exhibit in conjunction with the festival, which was followed by a sequence of examples of experimental arts curatorship from Birdcage, Café Oto and Worm (see #2 for a report of the latter).
In the recent week, Hans Koch has been developing his “two rooms, flipped” installation, which will be shown throughout the festival week. In this session, he talks about two things: the direction of his artistic work as a whole and the current installation.
To showcase a little bit of his history, he presents us a sequence of videos, emblematic of the way he is dealing with the cross-section of computers and music. First, “render-vous”, which involves hair dryers and rubber gloves strung up by a hanger, with the subtitled explanation delivering a laconically funny documentation of what is happening as the blow dryers go on and off haphazardly. When “sometimes a meeting just happens”, the hot air makes the gloves balloon in a gesture of a handshake. There is no control for when the two gloves inflate at once and become hands; the inflation happens completely at random since the circuitry has been tampered with.
Koch explains that he likes to use simple ideas and take things literally, exploring everyday tools and how they function, in the process to engage with things which are usually overlooked. He first started working with computers in Cologne where he studied composition. The interest in computers reflected an imbalance: people were not talking about computer music but software music, which marks a fine distinction for him. So by posing the question of what computer itself sounds like, he embarked on a series of experiments, for instance, opening up motherboards and making the circuitry itself generate the music, torturing them by splashing water on them too. “So at the end the thing is dead”, he laughs.
These experiments evolved in his using computers in more elaborate ways, investigating the relation that exists in the computer since it is a combination between software and hardware. These elements can be seen as a kind of unity which can be tapped in and explored. A laptop with built in speakers and a mike creates feedback which, to him, “was annoying”. He began to subvert this through a Max MSP patch which changed the space of the feedback, and it become possible to play a laptop like an accordion, using the keys and opening and closing the screen.
The ethos of seeing what is in a certain term by taking it very literally is at work with the current installation. Its origins can also be traced in another piece, “circle of fifths”, which is closely attuned to “two rooms, flipped” theoretically. He explains that Western music, in musicological terms,
can be conceptualised as a clockface, consisting of a circle of fifths, 12 pitches or keys; one is moving between the five notes and arriving at a C, at an F, at a G and so forth. Of course, this describes a virtual space in music, where melody travels, hopping around the circle. It is hardly thought about when engaged in the act of listening but it is an interesting concept for spatialising sound in quite concrete terms. In the “circle of fifths” Koch developed a filtering process which could filter out individual pitches – twelve speakers with each playing just one pitch were put in a circle so that all the individual pitches could be heard coming from their respective speakers. Thus is becomes apparent that everything in the middle of the circle consists of shifts in perception; the closer you are to one speaker the more you hear just one pitch.
The “two rooms, flipped” installation at STEIM for Sonic Acts takes from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass”, after a fashion. The idea was to create an acoustic mirror and to actually get behind the mirror, which could be realized at STEIM’s facilities because every room in the building is hooked up. The acoustic mirror thematic is an attempt to develop a horizontal mirror which flips frequencies, low to high and high to low. Whilst preserving the physicality of the two spaces, they are connected to one other with microphone and loudspeaker, and the sound produced in one room is mirrored in the other. There is a basic slowly gliding tone, which is flipped. The mike picks up any of the other noises or voices generated in the two rooms and flips them too. The voices of the other room are present in the one you’re standing, but through a distorting mirror.
Someone from the audience asks about the possibility of generating reversible sound, to which Koch replies that within this context one would have to be able to predict the future, which the computer can’t (just yet at least). The fascination about distortive mirrors is that they make you look fanciful – in the computationally simple folding of the frequencies, all the low frequencies end up high and compressed in the higher range (this is the nature of how we hear) so this process needs a mathematical intervention: the high frequencies are stretched out a bit. “The sound image is not the truth”, and Koch has needed to take steps to modify it.
In answer to an audience question about whether the installation could achieve co-presence in the internet, for example, Koch replies that he wants to have a real physical distance between the two pieces, like Alice, who can’t be in both spaces at once. Although, it is possible: the internet could indeed be a medium of “mixing” the two rooms.
As to whether it could be an acoustic equivalent to seeing reverse – the brain flips what we see upside down anyway, so upside down images can be flipped by the brain too as it gets adjusted through intense exposure – Koch notes that our culture is visually based so we can deal with visual experiments more easily. It could however form an interesting, if “quite annoying” attempt that could come close to torture, but perhaps people can too get adjusted to sounds flipped as well.
Koch’s background history is a case of studying a bit of everything, he admits. More musical than a visual background, so his references are predominantly acoustic but hieroglyphs and cuneiforms, physics, and broader history as well as involvement with radical constructivists have been formative.
“two rooms, flipped” is shown at STEIM throughout the Sonic Acts festival, 12-17.
The other entrant to the Sonic Acts festival from STEIM, Yutaka Makino, proceeds with an introduction of what he has been working on for the past month in order to achieve “Conflux”. He traces a bit of a background, the concept and the process of the work. Taking a cue from Edgar Varése’s notion of letting “the entire work [] flow as a river flows”, he came to think about what the new instrument for his generation could be. The answer: the computer. But that’s not it: the computer is a compound word – “com” which means together and “putar” to think. The challenge was how to create a system that works as a whole, thinking of the computer not just as a machine, simply asked to do specific work or tasks. In trying to control the entire system, tactically from bottom up, through self formation, and through finding form Makino is looking for emergent properties. In this space, one can proceed to the creation of behaviour which can be transformed into sound properties and systems. Makino follows with a striking image of a tornado, and another one, betraying an environmental sciences background. That training and sensitivity, coupled with Dan Graham’s idea of “dislocating math in a personal way for the artist”, he takes on the environment in the finding or inducing of “neutral” environments where you can find your own narratives. “Conflux” is linked to this idea.
Makino has previously been experimenting with wave field synthesis as a means of spatialising sound, in an effort to abstract space with sound. “Allosphere” in California, for instance, presented a total audio-visual immersive space. Yet Makino is not interested in spatialising anything per se, but redefining an environment, inducing interaction between the spectators and their surroundings. “Conflux” is taking on the idea of the environment through the mixture of light, sound and fog. The question is how to create a new type of behaviour within a space with a malleable, amorphous substance such as fog. One cannot separate sound, fog or light, but they exist as a whole. The installation is produced by allowing for two different temperatures of fog, which are alternated by the spectators’ body heat, as the hotter air travels up. The slowly merging fogs in the Melkweg media room, present a very slow piece, reactive to temperature and moistures.
The fog used is not special material in general; the trick is rather in composing an environment which alters the fog’s behaviour. This is not completely controllable, since the material is not computable. So it allows for diverse behavioural possibilities, all dependent on the bottom up heat flow. Makino does not have expectations of “100 per cent control” of the fog, or specific movements, rather it is enlivened by the temperature alterations and perhaps surprises therein. Fog as a material simultaneously exists and does not; one is in and out at the same time, and the patterns one might perceive in it when it gets all white is a case of the human brain dissecting, making sense of the white.
