Katarina Matiasek: Primordial Sound

Katarina Matiasek [*1965], artist and filmmaker living and working in Vienna, is present in the exhibition »Phonorama« with the video installation »Diva [2004]« created in collaboration with Scanner. In this multimedia lecture, the artist presents her latest film project »Ur-Geräusch,« which is based on the eponymous and only theoretical text from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In the text, Rilke drafts the idea of playing the sutures of a human skull with the needle of the recently invented gramophone. Matiasek photographs skulls-from the world’s largest collection at the natural history museum in Vienna-along their sutures and, with a special filming technique, projects them topographically onto a film level. Fed optically into a virtual synthesizer, these curve functions, with their vertical, horizontal, or chromatic qualities, each produce a corresponding soundtrack.