Text/Sound

On the subject of text and sound, the ZKM | Media Museum is showing a series of interactive installations from its own Permanent Collection.
Does the music of the Beatles sound different in the cellar, in a church or in your own living room? The Architecture-Music-Laboratory, developed in 1997 by Pierre Dutilleux and Christian Müller-Tomfelde in the Institute for Music and Acoustics for the Media Museum, it is now virtually possible to do what used to be impossible, namely, directly compare the same music played in different rooms.

The CD ROM »Small Fish« [1999] by Kiyoshi Furukawa, Masaki Fujihata and Wolfgang Münch shows what you hear – 15 fascinating scores in which movements and collisions of graphic objects and icons produce music.

The multi-user installation »Bubbles« subtly plays with the aesthetics of interaction – visitors can pop soap-bubbles with their shadow. As small complex systems, the soap-bubbles produce non-linear musical structures through touch. In reality, the musical structures are released by a MIDI interface and synthesizer. »Bubbles« uses a virtual time video tracking system in order to recognize the shadows. This media work of art was made by Wolfgang Münch and Kiyoshi Furukawa at the ZKM, Karlsruhe in 2000.

The installation »Miraton« [2003] by Frédéric Post is based on freeware with which sound data from the Internet (.wav, .aiff, .mp3, etc.) can be imported. A specially designed keyboard which is carried like a guitar on a shoulder strap is connected to a laptop via a long USB cable. This »instrument« and a simple interface permit the artist or the spectator to »perform« electronically and improvise and experiment with sound. In his performances, Frédéric Post prefers the aesthetic qualities of clubbing culture.

In 1997, Bas Boettcher developed the Looppool principle for fluid and undetectable divisions of non-linear time media at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. »Looppool 1.2« connects text with sound to make interactive rap. With a keyboard, users can navigate through a piece of music characterized by diverging and interwoven ornamentation. When integrated into a hypertext structure, the same fragment of text obtains various meanings. The interactive network installation »The Rules are no Game« [1999] by Markus Huemer connects the creation of text with the movements of the visitor on a reproduction of Jackson Pollock’s »No. 32«. Each movement of the visitor triggers a particular Internet mechanism which then generates the text.

»Poetry Machine« [2001] by David Link is a word processor that extracts associations. The sources of information for this self-composing poetry machine are the gigantic pools of information on the Internet. Finally, »Lacan Bottle« by Adolf Mathias is about the language we use to talk about the way things relate to themselves. It was created in 2001 at the ZKM | Media Museum for Basic Research and consists of a text editor with a navigator on top of a Klein bottle – a topological structure which makes questions about interiors and exteriors seem futile.