differing paths » catalogue

logodiffering paths

catalogue

Posted in blog von gerriet am 29. Jun. 2006

Here you can download the pdf. of the catalogue. If you would like a hardcopy (unfortunately only available in german) please write an E-mail to me and I will send you a volume.

dp_cat_01 dp_cat_02 dp_cat_04

The following lines are taken from the catalogue (introduction, thesis). If you would like to know what happened within the past three years and why I started the whole experiment, please go on reading or simply download the catalogue.

download dp catalogue german (.pdf, 2,5mb)
download dp catalogue english (.pdf, 3,3mb)

differing paths

0. Preface (by G. Geltinger)

In the beginning there is hardly a word. By the time words start to flow, the beginning has long since become mystery and myth. And yet, within the recollection, within the words and images that echo the very beginning, there remains a moment of deeply felt strangeness. And strangeness towards the world, in the words of Theodor W. Adorno, is a moment of art.
Word and image may create mystery and myth later on, yet in the beginning there is always something like a birth, and no other moment in life will ever be shaped by such an existentialist feeling of strangeness towards the world than that of the first look. Yet we don’t know about that, these very words are already nourishing the myth, and we do not have any memories of the moment of moments. What does remain is the life-long reverberation of that moment, a shiver, a deeply felt strangeness against the noisiness of our world in a moment of rest, an awareness of silence. A silence that refers to a place where there is nothing, and yet from which everything originates and goes to in the end. A silence, which may be drowned out once again by the noise, yet which leaves behind a slight feeling of discomfort.
Before the word that is between the beginning and its myth there is the music. If words fail us, then music carries our feelings towards a place that lies in the darkness of our memories. While still thinking about one word or the other, music has long since caused a shiver down our backs, as would heat or frost.
I listened to the piece “differing paths” for the first time in spring 2004, and I felt such a shiver. When Gerriet then invited me - in one of the 450 letters that left his home at that time - to write a text inspired by this music, I experienced a long time of uncomfortable silence inside. When he finally told me about his plan to put the music into words, to turn these words into films and then turn the films into music once again, I reacted very sceptical. I considered the project complete in the state of its musical composition, that is in its very beginning, long before words and images came in, because to me it gave a voice to the very shiver, to the slight feeling of discomfort echoing that moment of utter strangeness. To me, “differing paths” was the sound that the human soul produced at the furthest, darkest and coldest place in the universe, being reduced to its pure resonance within the vast voidness of being, and that was it. At least, this is what I told Gerriet when we sat on the university campus with bare arms on a spring day, surrounded by laughing, chattering students drinking beer and stretching their pale winter faces towards the approaching summer. What I did not tell him, and what took my words away for several weeks was the fact that this furthest, darkest and coldest place in the universe expressed in the music of “differing paths” was at the same time the most tender one. I did write a short story in the end, a story about a mother meeting a stranger at her child’s playground, falling into a deep crisis and becoming pregnant once again. In the meantime, it was almost summer and the responses to Gerriet’s 450 letters had been coming in for quite a while. Every week, texts of various different genres came in: poems, short stories, descriptions of moods, collections of thoughts, even word tables and deeply personal revelations. Striking and surprisingly consistent was the reoccurrence of the theme of birth in different motives, which also marked the later films as a thread – a thread of change, of different nuances, playful and manifold like the project “differing paths” itself. However different, and even in their most comical moments, these motives of birth pulsated and pushed towards that silence which I felt when first listening to Gerriet’s composition: Silence. Then, a scrabbling and rubbing, a rattling and crunching, bursting and cracking, and, finally – a heartbeat. The heartbeat of my own life in the void. The beginning.
This shiver, this moment of utter strangeness has become a lively, blooming and dazzling cosmos, a new, weird and unique world due to manifold human and artistic encounters and unions yet also rejections and failures. Works from very different artists and of different areas helped to create a world of its own, with a complexity that is suggested by this catalogue. All of this speaks for Gerriet’s wonderful, somewhat strange and daring experiment, which is not completely free from madness. It speaks for art, for turning our feeling of strangeness towards the world into another alien world that brings us closer to the mystery of the beginning with the help of images, words and music.

I had the pleasure of accompanying the project d.p. as Gerriet’s friend and colleague from its very first steps to its current state of great artistic variety and matured awareness of form, and I have also been involved in it as an artist myself. At this point, I would like to wish the project and its initiator that the “differing paths” may continue to grow and sprawl in their formal and medial diversity, and that they may always know how to withdraw from the urge of the profile-oriented art market to shorten and to dismember, and maintain that moment of strangeness towards the world in the centre of their poetry. May the slight feeling of discomfort the mother feels in my short story before the birth of her second child also accompany the days of “differing paths” like a resonating sound.

Gunther Geltinger, January 2006

-

I. About the project

1. The concept of d.p.

differing paths (d.p.) is an audiovisual experiment which works with texts, music and films created by different authors that are then given to a recipient for free combination. The project started with the composition of a piece of music in January 2004 and is not finished yet.
d.p. follows the idea of the modern score, of the artist as a collector and initiator, and of the open work of art “on the move”, not only when it comes to finding and organising the material, but also concerning its presentation. This arrangement of the experiment makes it possible to observe the flow of information in a wide net of informants and recipients and shows the drifting apart, joining together and the modulations of this flow.

2. d.p. – a piece of music

The starting point for my work is always a tone, a sound, sometimes a succession of sounds. I therefore collect sounds and pieces of music and examine them with regard to their mood. Later on, they are used as a memory storage either for the creation of a new piece of music or as a programme for works of art based on image or text.

At the beginning of d.p. was a musical narration which was closely related to my personal situation at the end of 2003/ beginning of 2004. I deliberately set the piece up in an emotional way, yet without using the most common musical stereotypes.
d.p. neither uses violins, guitars, standard cadences and chords nor does it work with surface grooves or current trends of the new electronic music à la DE: BUG. Rock, Pop, Glitch – all of these were left out in order to exclude as far as possible the sound-image-associations that are manifested through film, video clip or theatre. My piece of music is rather based on a succession of sounds that corresponded to my emotional state of mind at the time and to my curiosity as a composer. The basic sound series initiated a research of several months in all storages of sound available to me.
Nearly all the sound material consists of arranged samples taken from the work of musicians and composers who were and still are important for my own development, and whose emotionality and technically skilled solutions had been freeing and instructive for me. Yet, without knowledge of the original samples one cannot identify these artists and the corresponding songs and compositions anymore. Unfortunately, I cannot list them here for reasons of copyright. All in all, it was particularly important for me that already the first link in the chain of works to be produced for d.p. worked with samples of other artists.

The musical structure of d.p. is divided into three parts. Following the classical tradition of composition, different themes are presented, repeated and altered throughout the three parts which show a clear dramatic course.
The first part of the piece introduces rhythmical figures and melody approaches, yet at the same time refuses a melodic or rhythmically structured sound series. Instead, interruptions and breaks lead and refer to silence and deliberately guide the listener’s attention. Sound episodes are introduced and later on set in relation to each other. The second part works with a dark, harmonious movement of waves that suddenly emerges and establishes itself only to be stopped, interrupted and overlaid again. The rhythmic and harmonic sequences are now closer to each other, which means that the sound structure becomes more condense. The third part dissolves the tension and develops a rhythmic and melodic continuity, an extremely high-frequence floating. The formerly isolated frequences are led together and set in closer relation to each other. Themes from the first two parts are picked up again and even looped, something that had been completely avoided so far.

3. The material – the development

First phase

The first ‘domino’ of the artistic chain reaction that d.p. was supposed to trigger was the posting of the piece of music in 450 envelopes to diverse adressees in February 2004. In the attached letter (text see appendix 01), I asked the adressee to take his/her time to listen to my piece carefully. He/she should then phrase an open text based on the listening experience, a text that should intuitively treat the individual impression of d.p. In the next step these texts should be sent back to me. It was essential for this first dialogue that it was about an open invitation, not at all a request or an obligation for participation. Likewise, the system of transmission and response initiated by this step should be based throughout the project on the concept of a voluntary exchange of ideas free from any formal constraints.
With the help of various distribution channels of friends and acquaintances, d.p. reached Japan, India, the USA, Indonesia, Denmark, England and many other countries.
The feedback which started to come back in March 2004 and has not stopped yet contains different text genres ranging from keyword-collections, poems, short stories, tables, groups of letters and figures, scribbled pictures, typographic arrangements to diary entries, essays and many more.
I read these texts over and over again while listening to the music. I thought about their individual content, their imagery and associations with regard to my personal situation at the time of the composition and to my own relation to the sounds.

Second phase

After the careful sifting of the material I chose five texts. The criteria were not the quality or formal closeness of the texts nor their ability to be set into film or sound, but their closeness to the contents of the piece of music.
Rhythm, flow of narration and jumps in the plot, location, mood and atmosphere were crucial factors for the final choice, as was my own intuition.
The chosen texts were then given to five filmmakers, all of them being personal
acquaintances whose work I know and with part of whom I had already worked.

The filmmakers are:
Bettina Eberhard, London
Sandeep Mehta, Cologne
Dirk Schäfer, Istanbul/Ankara
Melissa Perales, Berlin
Ramón Manes, Madrid

I asked these filmmakers to each set one of the texts into a short film without any formal specification – the artists should be as free with the interpretation of the texts as the authors had been.
The only condition was that the film length should be between five and seven minutes, yet this condition was not abided by everyone.

Third phase

Before all five films were finished and got back to me in September 2005, there was an active exchange going on about the texts and their adaption. During this process, some of the filmmakers left the project, questioned and even objected to parts of the texts, expressed insecurity due to the abundance of possibilities and to the further process of work after the completion of the film. Yet, all of this was outweighed by a feeling of joy and even gratitude in the end. They had the opportunity to react spontaneously and directly to a text, to make their own personal associations and become aware of their development. The filmmakers felt that all this motivated the working process immensely, as did the absence of the conventional, often tedious approach of producing a film.

Fourth phase

After going through the film material in detail, I handed on each film to two different musicians and asked them to set it to music. I offered each film to two musicians with different methods of work in order to leave the field of associations and intuition open within which the project had been growing for more than a year until then. Like with the filmmakers, I had made personal acquaintance with the musicians during the last few years, either while working together on a project or because of their interest in d.p.

The musicians are:
Thrasier, Cologne
Dirk Specht, Aachen and Berlin
Vitor Joaquim, Setubal/Portugal
Gregor Schwellenbach, Cologne
Volker Hennes, Bonn
Robert Vater, Cologne
Viola Kramer, Aachen
Ritsuko Hanao, Aichi/Japan
Tom Linden, London
Norbert Stein, Rösrath

The idea of freedom of form and working method remained a principle in this phase of the project, too. The only requirement for the musicians was the length of the film they treated.

Finally, I would like to add that neither the filmmakers nor the musicians had access to the original piece of music before they had finished their own work.

Fifth phase

Before the last contributions to d.p. got back to me, I started to plan the realisation of the concept in terms of the design together with the digital media designer Carsten Goertz (Cologne). An essential aspect for us was to visualise the original idea of exchange and flow of information as well as the transparence in all directions of the process. We then elaborated the entire documentation and presentation as well as the interactive dramaturgy of the laboratory, trying to keep the demonstration as simple as possible for the benfit of the effect of the collected material. Carsten Goertz is responsible for the entire creative arrangement of the documentation and presentation of d.p.

4. Documentation and presentation

4.1. Creation and fabrication of a documentary CD-Rom

For the complete documentation of the project we first produced a CD-Rom. On a rastered surface every contribution is designed as a symbol. When touching an icon with the mouse pointer, the source and the further treatment of the contribution is shown.
By clicking onto an icon, the respective contribution opens up in a different window and shows the author. All in all, the following perspectives are available:

display of the project on the welcome page, general overview
listening facilities for the original piece of music
presentation of the texts including information on their origins and authors
viewing facilities for the short films without music
viewing facilities for the short films with the particular pieces of music
playing facilities for the music without the films

4.2. The laboratory

In the next step, the entire material has been embedded in a spatial concept of presentation. It is based on a visual surface on which the recipient can freely choose between the different contributions with the help of a controller. He thus becomes a wanderer on paths that are laid out without being calculated or determined. He can navigate freely through the material led by his own intuition, and read the texts while listening to the original music. Likewise, he is free to choose a film score from the final production phase and combine it with any of the films or, again, to fade in a text from the first phase of production. The selected individual path of the recipient through the presented material is visualised as a branched pattern on a screen in the background which is complemented with every new choice.

The composition the laboratory is deliberately plain. Centered in a dark room, we can see a large screen (3mx4m) with loudspeakers to its left and right. In front of the screen, in adequate watching distance, we can find the navigation controller on a small stand. The programme is played by a computer outside earshot and range of vision. The emphasis thus lies on the engagement with the material and the recipient’s game of mind. The equipment as the medium of presentation thereby steps back.

4.3. The catalogue

In order to give the visitor the chance to retrace and comprehend the laboratory also in terms of theory and evolutionary history, a catalogue was designed that functions as a kind of preparation for the actual laboratory. This catalogue contains an introduction, illustrations of the original texts and a list of all authors, filmmakers and musicians including background information.
At the same time, artefacts like drawings, objects, collages and props, emerged from the different processes of work, are displayed in order make the complex working process of d.p. more transparent. The catalogue with its overview of the used materials and media underlines once more the playful character of the exchange processes. With its comments on the variety and origin of the contributions, it also prepares for the visit of the laboratory. Besides, it serves as a guideline for a future exhibition concept.

4.4. Further developments – the exhibition

Partial results of the project have already been introduced to the public during the working process in order to try out the developing material. Gunther Geltinger’s text for example was presented at the Literaturhaus Cologne in October 2004 together with the original piece of music. That way, the product of one phase of d.p. bore fruit in form of a public reading; the text based on the piece of music was thus used by the author in the literary field. Further presentations of the contributions to d.p. are in progress. The authors, filmmakers and musicians are of course completely free concerning the further use of their works.

The film material that was created for d.p. will be edited in order to create an episodical movie named “differing paths”. The original piece of music that I composed in January 2004 will function as a prologue to the film on a black screen.

The original texts (handwritten, typewritten etc.), the printed Emails, the laboratory, the catalogue, the episodical movie and the ten different pieces of music will all be displayed in an exhibition in the end. In its showrooms, all the different paths of the last two years will merge during the time of the exhibition.

4.5. Personal estimation

I would like to stress at this point that, in the different stages of its development, the project d.p. has never been following any didactic intentions, on the contrary: It was supposed to offer experiences to all participants, individual as well as collective experiences, yet not inevitably the latter. Information was freely exchanged, discussed and commented upon, or manipulated and handed on in fragments.
The focus of d.p. was never on the final product, but on its process-related character and on the meaning of each individual step for the project as a whole as well as for the single participant (1).

What makes this project special to me is the observation of the flow of information. Never before has it been possible to demonstrate both the movement and the change of information by different media supra-regionally and promptly (even in realtime) in such a concise way, and to use them creatively. In d.p., Indians in Delhi meet music from Cologne, write texts that are in turn adapted by a London filmmaker so that a Portugese experimental musician can create a musical reaction to the images. A Cologne bicycle courier writes a text for d.p. that is adapted by a filmmaker in Istanbul. A musician then takes the images from this film with him on a concert and rehearsal tour between Switzerland and Hamburg, and finally composes a piece of music in his room just above the Reeperbahn. A filmmaker in Cologne receives a text that was written by a film editor in Delhi as a reaction to d.p. He associates with this text an experience that his own father, also an Indian, had in prison when trying to immigrate into the USA. The score to his film will be written by a Cologne computer musician as well as by an avantgarde saxophone player and composer. None of the participants have known each other before, nor have they been connected with one another geographically or through the membership of the same institution.

-

II. differing paths – an open invitation

1. Personal background

As a musician, composer and sound designer, I have been working opus-oriented throughout the last few years. Sound and image are generated, tested, rejected and created anew on the computer. In the end emerges a programme, a piece of music, a film.
During this working period, I have repeatedly made the experience that the intense and exclusive relation to one’s own project on the computer generates some kind of ‘laptop-autism’. Within such narrow limits, the results of one’s work often come across as deliberately overdrawn, banal, coarse, cryptic and hardly ready to be deciphered or comprehended without personal acquaintance with the author.
Yet, by consciously refusing any dialogue with the recipient, such works of art hardly offer any friction surface for the discussion of current trends and developments. They are either accepted or refused – both being reactions that they, consciously or unconsciously, often provoke themselves. I perceive this autistic way of production as a strong analogy to the outside world in which the predominance of the product makes the individual either withdraw completely into the private sphere or yield to common power structures. A friction surface that evokes communication in form of a dialogue is not wanted here: People who reflect their own position and thus constantly redefine it are neither tangible as consumers nor is their effect measurable as producers.

None of this is generally condemnable or particularly unfortunate. And yet, such trends do raise the question if it is still adequate to conceive a work of art exclusively as a completed product, considering that art is a reaction to an everyday life that increasingly creates disillusioned, community-reluctant individuals without any vision.
In the conventional process of production, the accomplished work of art represents the synthesis of various ideas and thoughts. The recipient is situated at the end of a whole chain of processes that have been filtered and are then shown in form of an extract by the producer. Intermediary levels of artistic production are hardly ever perceivable with this method. The conventional film production for example would try anything to veil the individual working processes of the art departments and make them merge with the work of art as a whole. One could say that the film production dictated by Hollywood is designed as the traditional production of products with a mere consumational value, being purely commercial and without any appreciation for the individual artistic piece in its originality.

Naturally, the creation of art often involves hiding the machinery, the tricks and the technology. In that case, the main purpose is to create a certain ‘magic’ or to maintain the magic of appearance that especially the art of film still believes to possess. Yet, with the reduction of creative processes to only one object, one cannot talk about ‘magic’ anymore in many fields of today’s art production. For what exactly could we still call ‘magic’ at Hollywood or Babelsberg, at BMG or big art fairs – perhaps the unimaginable economic effort, or the waste of individual creative performances?

2. Theoretical approach to the experimental set-up

2.1. The material in process

When conceiving d.p., it was important for me to exchange a very personal piece of music for something else very personal in order to initiate a series of give-and-exchange activities in the field of artistic production. In contrast to the conventional and commercial barter of a work of art, the emphasis here does not lie on the final product i.e. the measurable value (by cash), but on the ‘unprovable’ and indirect investment of time, creative commitment, opulence of ideas and so on.

In the sketch of the work processes of this project,
one might find parallels to the connexion scheme of a synthesizer. I consciously included this process-related idea in my project.
The practice of the synthetic production of sound which always operates with the chain

oscillator – filter – amplification

often follows a similar scheme (2) . This system can be extended into any direction and, because it is a modular concept, it can also form loops within itself. Oscillators can in their turn receive an impulse from the controlling signals, as can the filters be enforced and re-filtered. Besides, the feedbacks that have been an issue of debate in the media arts for years are also feasible in the form of loops.
The experiment set-up hereby becomes the instrument that firstly produces acoustic material.

„In this new music the tools themselves have become the instruments and the resulting sound is born of their use unintended by their designers (Cascone 3)“

To sum up, this is what happens: A signal is generated. A simple wave makes its way through a chain of filters, spreads and is bundled again and can be observed at certain exits.
Whereas the representators of the academic electronics and their supporters like to claim that the synthetic generation of sound is a controllable process similar to the pressing of a key on the piano, other (especially non-academic) people are more intrigued by the possibility to involve the unpredictable and –listenable into the working process.

This inclusion of aleatory elements is not new at all. One can find it in the 1950s and –60s for example with composers like Cage (“Music of Changes”) or Stockhausen (“Klavierstück XI”), and of course, these were not the pioneers (4).
Thus, the instrument provides the facility for the perhaps not infinite, yet certainly not straightforward chain of events. In this respect it is important that the user, though being able to control or manipulate the trigger and the junctions of the chain, cannot always predict the definite result, that is the sound. Preliminary theoretical considerations are able to point out directions within the result, yet the associations remain intuitive, and the result is to be expected with suspense.

„Sometimes not knowing the theoretical operation of a tool can result in more interesting results by -thinking outside of the box-….(Cascone 5)“

One can therefore only know what the sound is like after having passed through the entire chain. While working on the sound, partial sounds emerge from the process and are to some extent not reproducable. One should record them, get to know them and reconcile them with the original idea. The material requests evaluation. Some of these partial sounds might be considered waste or superfluous. Yet, such classification is only used by unimaginative ‘cooks’, for anything can be of use, even the outmoust skin.

„Because the tools used in this style of music embody advanced concepts of digital signals processing, their usage (by glitch artists) tends to be based on experimentation rather than empirical investigation (Cascone 6).“

I have transferred this way of working to the development process and to the form of presentation of d.p. The experiment was thus from the beginning part of a composing and of a learning process; both processes cannot be separated from each other anymore in the proceeding course of the project.

2.2 The reception of the material

d.p. refuses on purpose the process of becoming a product, its final form remaining open to the recipient. The entire work does not aim at one ultimate impression; it is rather meant as an invitation for observing and exploring, for ‘strolling’ in its different layers. Hence, my intention is not to create an untouchable ‘opus perfectum et absolutum’ that stands as a monolith like a juridical or religious text of law. d.p. rather understands itself as an open work in progress (Ecco 7).

The alternative idea of production of d.p. intends a dialogue that can be held between the recipient and the material in the laboratory. This dialogue is always one that is led by the recipient himself, by his conception of the work of art and his requests concerning its options. None of the options offered by the laboratory evokes, neither technically nor through playing with thoughts, the illusion that this relation could be turned upside down. The visitor remains the creative observer and arranger of the material whereas the apparatus ‘only’ provides the material.

-

III. Collaboration instead of cooperation
- d.p. as a model for artistic production

d.p. can be seen as a model for associated artistic production. As the current (January 2006) DADA-exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris shows, trends and stylistic developments often result from the exchange of ideas and material, intermedia-wise and supra-regional.

In order to be able to draw a line against the formalisation and control exercised by the outside world, a group of people is needed. In the past, such networks have usually defined themselves according to a certain programme and to the steps of action to be taken. This provided them with both strength gathered from within themselves and with the ability to draw a line against the outside. A classical paradigm for the collective in the last 50 years is the band.
Looking at the band as an example for a collective, one can say that it is self-governing and it provides an internal exchange of know-how as well as a forum for trying out musical and performative ideas. Usually, the band is locally bound which means the musicians are all from the same area and gather for repetitions at a rehearsal room. Besides, such a community offers protection against attacks from an unloved outside world.
These advantages are opposed by factors such as the effort involved (in terms of organisation as well as emotionally), difficulties concerning competence and power, democratic fallibility, no means of retreat and phasing of ways of thinking and acting. For a long time, the band was seen as the ideal of the impetuously powerful creative cell: linked by friendship, united by its own original sound. I have been playing in bands for a long time and would not like to comment on how true or cliché such images are.

I think that this model, at least in its original shape, is outdated. Very few bands like for example King Crimson have managed to express themselves anew on a high level over the years. This process was also based on a certain policy: At the height of success, the collective disintegrated and only reassembled after a long and intense orientation of its members. Even so, we have been attending a massive dying out of bands for some years now. Aged figures hold on to their electric magic wands. While in former times we wanted to believe that they tried to force from the current something powerful, strong, wild, some kind of anti-matter, we now see them with a pacemaker under their chest, wrung out by the marketing of their former opponents. At the same time, rock/pop academies are emerging, in Germany as well as elsewhere. Young bands follow their old heroes suit, only they want to be smarter, take less or ‘cleaner’ drugs, be educated in the media at academies, give better interviews and not die so young like Jimi or Curt or…

Such observations are not new, but they are mentioned here in order to contrast them with another trend, a countermovement. To escape the tangle of collective external determination, many common projects have passed from cooperation to collaboration. Collaboration means a short, project-related teamwork, the encounter being in the foreground. The working process does not have to result in a completed work of art, in a song. Rather has the idea of the session been revived which, by the way, used to be the origin of many bands. The aims of collaboration as defined above are the fusion of machines with conventional instruments, the use of the machine as an instrument, the work with different media, the friction of the different layers and their observation. The awareness of the temporal limitation of the encounter can change the intenseness of the contact and reinforce our observation of the encounter. That way, themes can be brought up and be treated very quickly. The artists are no longer bound to one particular place (rehearsal room, stage, same city), but are constantly on the move and align with others for a short moment. They help each other, exchange information, software and ideas. As a model, d.p. offers the chance to develop new, non-commercial ways of distribution through the collaboration of different participants. Ideas and drafts do not necessarily rely on publication, but what they do need is exchange. Personal reaction instead of academic interpretation offers a strong individual participation, based on voluntariness and the pleasure principle. One finds common grounds in fields where one would not have expected them, and learns new ways of thinking.

The moment of transmission can then trigger further creative processes for a third person. Freedom in the treatment of the material also allows the playful reinterpretation and change of the original. All contributions are thus equal. There is no special accentuation or hierarchy of the media. Music stands next to text stands next to image stands next to music. There are no serving media or historic dominances like that of the eye over the ear. In this model, material gets connected that before and under conventional conditions would not have been composed. Thus, connections are created that are usually only produced with the help of the conventional intersections of the cultural business such as labels, publishing companies, schools, museums and so on. But under these conditions, the connections would probably not have been created at all, because such institutions are subject to a tight programming which excludes ideas and thus either blocks their development completely or manipulates them in a way that they can only be perceived as an institutionally shaped appearance. In contrast to that, d.p. allows a greater dynamic which is essential for a free concept of artistic production that is full of ideas.

When dealing with the conventional notion of economic production, one realises that the so-called cultural business is nothing more but a branch of the economy. Whoever submits to its mechanisms will have to yield to the rules of effective production at some point. Furthermore, elevating the playing around with the institutions as a form of art seems to me something obsolete or at least outdated. To me, the results of such art always end in cynicism.

In contrast to that, models like d.p. allow the protection of the actual process of approaching a work for a long time. It only depends on the consensus of the authors if the project turns out to be a video-clip, a public reading with sounds or rather a screenplay in the end. Only they can decide when this consensus is reached, and when the work as such can be presented or published. Instead of focussing on a hierarchic apparatus, the emphasis lies on a game composition that encourages the productivity. This game composition can, but does not have to, be held together by an organiser. The experimental set-up is thus based on a net-like diagram. Like Serres develops Penelope in his model of the communicational net, each point represents a personal assumption. Each path stands for the connection or relation between two or more assumptions, or for a flow of determination between different elements of this empiric situation.

The multitude of connections between the summits inevitably leads to the vision of a reaction. The effect of this reaction has a direct impact on its cause. A new net can develop at any point of the net. Thus, narrative structures become possible that are usually excepted because of the conventional classification and commercialisation of the cultural industry that similarly lead to a narrow categorisation by the consumer. Music or literature? Video clip or film? The artist is permanently exposed to the question which editorial department, which label is appropriate for him and his individual work of art. For without label, without art gallery or publishing company, he means nothing in the long run.

This situation demands strategies that allow the artist to escape trends of standardisation, and to confront them with alternative concepts that emphasise the originality of the work of art instead of its marketing qualities. Because of their versatility, collaborative productions that resort to a heterogeneous pool of materials can be displaced quickly into any field of the media. Thus, themes are created, connected and transferred. I am therefore looking at a net that is in constant development and that - this is crucial - represents an unstable power position. Once activated, it can develop into all possible geographical and artistic directions in the different media. It might establish itself in one particular region, bend to one side or relocate itself. It might satiate itself, overstretch itself and thus collapse. This openness is its chance.

Every trend of creative production has its own school by now. In the end, these schools harden the results and experiences of past experiments and mostly suppress new trends, which is part of their policy, a policy of power.
In the academic sense, the openness of the collaborative system implies its own failure, because the lightness of the connections inevitably leads to what is called a “misunderstanding”, a “misinterpretation” or a “change in style”. Yet, it is this aspect of “failure” that allows the movement. It includes an element of surprise, of pausing, something that I believe to be one of the most effective instruments against professional curiosity.

It is very likely that these networks of creative collaboration produce a lot of things that could be designated as unsystematic superimposing or as chaos. Acoustically, this would be termed “noise”.
“ Noise is a non-periodic sonic event with an irregular time course, which cannot be assigned to a tone pitch. It thus presents a contrast to sound and tone. (8)”


Yet, it is essentially this “noise” from which we eventually extract and compose our songs and symphonies. Noise has been frowned upon in music for a long time. Yet, since the last century we have experienced the inversion of this relation. The noise, the sound outside the classical body of instruments has become the outstanding quality in music and the fourth dimension next to rhythm, harmony and melody.
Noise and sound have been equal materials in music since the 1960s (Karheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Oscar Scala and many more) at the latest. Besides, the distortion, the feedback of the signal of the electric guitar that originally emerged from an uncontrolled blasting of the amplification, has become the leading signal of a rebellious countermovement and its music. What seemed chaotic, obsolete or a mistake in the beginning has become part of a work of art and then a vocabulary of its own.
This concept can also be found in what Kim Cascone calls the “aesthetics of failure” in new electronics (Cascone 9). He outlines the history of so-called “Glitch”, a special kind of electronic music that works with so-called faults such as clicking, putting out of tune, noise, sounds of the hard drive, distortions and others.

„… it is from that „failure“ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization, noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music (Cascone 10).
…The technique of exposing the minituae of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has helped further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music, but it has also forced us to examine our preconceptions of failure and detritus more carefully (Cascone 11).“

Thus, the meaning of the by-product and of the fault are also an issue here. Often, it is especially the work that is generated at the edge of one’s own work that gives an insight into one’s own background and reasons, because such by-products are developed in a lighter, less conscious way.

-

IV. Conclusion and future prospects

With d.p., I started to write out a small idea, a thought, with the help of many participants. Now that the score and the instruments are provided, one can still watch out for the play and the individual works of art.

„(W)hen you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I´d like our activities to be more social-and anarchically so (Cage 12).“

The structure and composition of d.p. are strongly constructed along the notation and material-organisation of modern music. Originally, the score was the proof of authorship, the evidence for a creator, the work itself. The score bears the hand of the composer.

„A score was an individual ´s signature on a work. It also made unequivocal the author´s claim to the legal ownership of a sound blueprint. „Blueprint“ because a score is mute and others have to give it body, sound, and meaning. Moreover, notation established the difference and immortality of work in the abstract, irrespective of its performance (Cutler 13).
In fact the whole edifice of western art music can be said, after a fashion, to be constructed upon and through notation, which, amongst other things, creates „the composer“ who is thus constitutionally bound to it.(Cutler 14)“

“Newer” concepts mostly turn away from that (see for example Earl Brown, December 1952). What is noted are distances, centres, concentrations, structures, often independent of a particular instrumentation. The interpreter is supposed to become a creator, even if he is faced with a piece of paper that shows lines, dots and words. The composer gives the impulse, makes suggestions, opens a forum.
The headline, the theme and certain directions may be layed out by him, yet their accomplishment and their establishment can and shall be achieved by others (see appendix 02). This is not so much about the proof of authorship of a self-contained, monolithic work, for we are nowadays enlightened enough to know that each work relates to or even uses at least one other work according to content and form.

Maybe we do not have to go as far as Stravinsky who supposedly said,

“A good composer does not imitate, he steals.(15)“

Still, at the moment the authorship is at disposition in many areas because of the developments in art and technology. Just the rapid development of the recording media from audiotape to harddisc and instruments like the sampler question the conventional approach of the composer as the exclusive intellectual author in a way that has never before been the case.

„The concept of owning music is really falling appart (…T)here is simply no technological backing for traditional concepts anymore. Playback, storing, copying, distributing music is effortles. Music spreads like a Virus…(Oschatz 16)“

Pieces of information, no matter if they exist in the form of music, text or image, always spread in a way that can hardly be controlled. They connect, and flood all the conventional dikes and channels. They might drain away in some places, only to resurface at others. Origin and history are still interesting and helpful for the perception and the presentation of something original, yet the present does not allow holding on to the conventional one-dimensional artist-work identification without strong restrictions.
I try to offer a kind of open score, both for the level of finding the material as well as for the later level of making it accessible and useable for others.
The starting point, the pattern, the length of some contributions, the use of the played music as a draft and an impulse for the next interpretor, the summing up of themes and their transmission up to their final delivery for a new interpretation – all of these are essential parts of this score that in the end bears the hand of many authors.

„The musical hierarchy – distinctions that separated composer an performer and listener – will become outmoded.
What will happen, rather, is that new participation areas will proliferate and that many more hands will be required to achieve the execution of a particular environmental experience. Because of this complexity, because so many levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the indiviualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing(Gould 17).“

At the end of this three years-experiment during which I received an abundance of resonance and feedback, I would like to thank all the participants for letting me be a part of it.

Gerriet K. Sharma, October 2006.

(Translation by Claudia Knött)

catalogue

Posted in blog von gerriet am 29. Jun. 2006

Here you can download the pdf. of the catalogue. If you would like a hardcopy (unfortunately only available in german) please write an E-mail to me and I will send you a volume.

dp_cat_01 dp_cat_02 dp_cat_04

The following lines are taken from the catalogue (introduction, thesis). If you would like to know what happened within the past three years and why I started the whole experiment, please go on reading or simply download the catalogue.

download dp catalogue german (.pdf, 2,5mb)
download dp catalogue english (.pdf, 3,3mb)

differing paths

0. Preface (by G. Geltinger)

In the beginning there is hardly a word. By the time words start to flow, the beginning has long since become mystery and myth. And yet, within the recollection, within the words and images that echo the very beginning, there remains a moment of deeply felt strangeness. And strangeness towards the world, in the words of Theodor W. Adorno, is a moment of art.
Word and image may create mystery and myth later on, yet in the beginning there is always something like a birth, and no other moment in life will ever be shaped by such an existentialist feeling of strangeness towards the world than that of the first look. Yet we don’t know about that, these very words are already nourishing the myth, and we do not have any memories of the moment of moments. What does remain is the life-long reverberation of that moment, a shiver, a deeply felt strangeness against the noisiness of our world in a moment of rest, an awareness of silence. A silence that refers to a place where there is nothing, and yet from which everything originates and goes to in the end. A silence, which may be drowned out once again by the noise, yet which leaves behind a slight feeling of discomfort.
Before the word that is between the beginning and its myth there is the music. If words fail us, then music carries our feelings towards a place that lies in the darkness of our memories. While still thinking about one word or the other, music has long since caused a shiver down our backs, as would heat or frost.
I listened to the piece “differing paths” for the first time in spring 2004, and I felt such a shiver. When Gerriet then invited me - in one of the 450 letters that left his home at that time - to write a text inspired by this music, I experienced a long time of uncomfortable silence inside. When he finally told me about his plan to put the music into words, to turn these words into films and then turn the films into music once again, I reacted very sceptical. I considered the project complete in the state of its musical composition, that is in its very beginning, long before words and images came in, because to me it gave a voice to the very shiver, to the slight feeling of discomfort echoing that moment of utter strangeness. To me, “differing paths” was the sound that the human soul produced at the furthest, darkest and coldest place in the universe, being reduced to its pure resonance within the vast voidness of being, and that was it. At least, this is what I told Gerriet when we sat on the university campus with bare arms on a spring day, surrounded by laughing, chattering students drinking beer and stretching their pale winter faces towards the approaching summer. What I did not tell him, and what took my words away for several weeks was the fact that this furthest, darkest and coldest place in the universe expressed in the music of “differing paths” was at the same time the most tender one. I did write a short story in the end, a story about a mother meeting a stranger at her child’s playground, falling into a deep crisis and becoming pregnant once again. In the meantime, it was almost summer and the responses to Gerriet’s 450 letters had been coming in for quite a while. Every week, texts of various different genres came in: poems, short stories, descriptions of moods, collections of thoughts, even word tables and deeply personal revelations. Striking and surprisingly consistent was the reoccurrence of the theme of birth in different motives, which also marked the later films as a thread – a thread of change, of different nuances, playful and manifold like the project “differing paths” itself. However different, and even in their most comical moments, these motives of birth pulsated and pushed towards that silence which I felt when first listening to Gerriet’s composition: Silence. Then, a scrabbling and rubbing, a rattling and crunching, bursting and cracking, and, finally – a heartbeat. The heartbeat of my own life in the void. The beginning.
This shiver, this moment of utter strangeness has become a lively, blooming and dazzling cosmos, a new, weird and unique world due to manifold human and artistic encounters and unions yet also rejections and failures. Works from very different artists and of different areas helped to create a world of its own, with a complexity that is suggested by this catalogue. All of this speaks for Gerriet’s wonderful, somewhat strange and daring experiment, which is not completely free from madness. It speaks for art, for turning our feeling of strangeness towards the world into another alien world that brings us closer to the mystery of the beginning with the help of images, words and music.

I had the pleasure of accompanying the project d.p. as Gerriet’s friend and colleague from its very first steps to its current state of great artistic variety and matured awareness of form, and I have also been involved in it as an artist myself. At this point, I would like to wish the project and its initiator that the “differing paths” may continue to grow and sprawl in their formal and medial diversity, and that they may always know how to withdraw from the urge of the profile-oriented art market to shorten and to dismember, and maintain that moment of strangeness towards the world in the centre of their poetry. May the slight feeling of discomfort the mother feels in my short story before the birth of her second child also accompany the days of “differing paths” like a resonating sound.

Gunther Geltinger, January 2006

-

I. About the project

1. The concept of d.p.

differing paths (d.p.) is an audiovisual experiment which works with texts, music and films created by different authors that are then given to a recipient for free combination. The project started with the composition of a piece of music in January 2004 and is not finished yet.
d.p. follows the idea of the modern score, of the artist as a collector and initiator, and of the open work of art “on the move”, not only when it comes to finding and organising the material, but also concerning its presentation. This arrangement of the experiment makes it possible to observe the flow of information in a wide net of informants and recipients and shows the drifting apart, joining together and the modulations of this flow.

2. d.p. – a piece of music

The starting point for my work is always a tone, a sound, sometimes a succession of sounds. I therefore collect sounds and pieces of music and examine them with regard to their mood. Later on, they are used as a memory storage either for the creation of a new piece of music or as a programme for works of art based on image or text.

At the beginning of d.p. was a musical narration which was closely related to my personal situation at the end of 2003/ beginning of 2004. I deliberately set the piece up in an emotional way, yet without using the most common musical stereotypes.
d.p. neither uses violins, guitars, standard cadences and chords nor does it work with surface grooves or current trends of the new electronic music à la DE: BUG. Rock, Pop, Glitch – all of these were left out in order to exclude as far as possible the sound-image-associations that are manifested through film, video clip or theatre. My piece of music is rather based on a succession of sounds that corresponded to my emotional state of mind at the time and to my curiosity as a composer. The basic sound series initiated a research of several months in all storages of sound available to me.
Nearly all the sound material consists of arranged samples taken from the work of musicians and composers who were and still are important for my own development, and whose emotionality and technically skilled solutions had been freeing and instructive for me. Yet, without knowledge of the original samples one cannot identify these artists and the corresponding songs and compositions anymore. Unfortunately, I cannot list them here for reasons of copyright. All in all, it was particularly important for me that already the first link in the chain of works to be produced for d.p. worked with samples of other artists.

The musical structure of d.p. is divided into three parts. Following the classical tradition of composition, different themes are presented, repeated and altered throughout the three parts which show a clear dramatic course.
The first part of the piece introduces rhythmical figures and melody approaches, yet at the same time refuses a melodic or rhythmically structured sound series. Instead, interruptions and breaks lead and refer to silence and deliberately guide the listener’s attention. Sound episodes are introduced and later on set in relation to each other. The second part works with a dark, harmonious movement of waves that suddenly emerges and establishes itself only to be stopped, interrupted and overlaid again. The rhythmic and harmonic sequences are now closer to each other, which means that the sound structure becomes more condense. The third part dissolves the tension and develops a rhythmic and melodic continuity, an extremely high-frequence floating. The formerly isolated frequences are led together and set in closer relation to each other. Themes from the first two parts are picked up again and even looped, something that had been completely avoided so far.

3. The material – the development

First phase

The first ‘domino’ of the artistic chain reaction that d.p. was supposed to trigger was the posting of the piece of music in 450 envelopes to diverse adressees in February 2004. In the attached letter (text see appendix 01), I asked the adressee to take his/her time to listen to my piece carefully. He/she should then phrase an open text based on the listening experience, a text that should intuitively treat the individual impression of d.p. In the next step these texts should be sent back to me. It was essential for this first dialogue that it was about an open invitation, not at all a request or an obligation for participation. Likewise, the system of transmission and response initiated by this step should be based throughout the project on the concept of a voluntary exchange of ideas free from any formal constraints.
With the help of various distribution channels of friends and acquaintances, d.p. reached Japan, India, the USA, Indonesia, Denmark, England and many other countries.
The feedback which started to come back in March 2004 and has not stopped yet contains different text genres ranging from keyword-collections, poems, short stories, tables, groups of letters and figures, scribbled pictures, typographic arrangements to diary entries, essays and many more.
I read these texts over and over again while listening to the music. I thought about their individual content, their imagery and associations with regard to my personal situation at the time of the composition and to my own relation to the sounds.

Second phase

After the careful sifting of the material I chose five texts. The criteria were not the quality or formal closeness of the texts nor their ability to be set into film or sound, but their closeness to the contents of the piece of music.
Rhythm, flow of narration and jumps in the plot, location, mood and atmosphere were crucial factors for the final choice, as was my own intuition.
The chosen texts were then given to five filmmakers, all of them being personal
acquaintances whose work I know and with part of whom I had already worked.

The filmmakers are:
Bettina Eberhard, London
Sandeep Mehta, Cologne
Dirk Schäfer, Istanbul/Ankara
Melissa Perales, Berlin
Ramón Manes, Madrid

I asked these filmmakers to each set one of the texts into a short film without any formal specification – the artists should be as free with the interpretation of the texts as the authors had been.
The only condition was that the film length should be between five and seven minutes, yet this condition was not abided by everyone.

Third phase

Before all five films were finished and got back to me in September 2005, there was an active exchange going on about the texts and their adaption. During this process, some of the filmmakers left the project, questioned and even objected to parts of the texts, expressed insecurity due to the abundance of possibilities and to the further process of work after the completion of the film. Yet, all of this was outweighed by a feeling of joy and even gratitude in the end. They had the opportunity to react spontaneously and directly to a text, to make their own personal associations and become aware of their development. The filmmakers felt that all this motivated the working process immensely, as did the absence of the conventional, often tedious approach of producing a film.

Fourth phase

After going through the film material in detail, I handed on each film to two different musicians and asked them to set it to music. I offered each film to two musicians with different methods of work in order to leave the field of associations and intuition open within which the project had been growing for more than a year until then. Like with the filmmakers, I had made personal acquaintance with the musicians during the last few years, either while working together on a project or because of their interest in d.p.

The musicians are:
Thrasier, Cologne
Dirk Specht, Aachen and Berlin
Vitor Joaquim, Setubal/Portugal
Gregor Schwellenbach, Cologne
Volker Hennes, Bonn
Robert Vater, Cologne
Viola Kramer, Aachen
Ritsuko Hanao, Aichi/Japan
Tom Linden, London
Norbert Stein, Rösrath

The idea of freedom of form and working method remained a principle in this phase of the project, too. The only requirement for the musicians was the length of the film they treated.

Finally, I would like to add that neither the filmmakers nor the musicians had access to the original piece of music before they had finished their own work.

Fifth phase

Before the last contributions to d.p. got back to me, I started to plan the realisation of the concept in terms of the design together with the digital media designer Carsten Goertz (Cologne). An essential aspect for us was to visualise the original idea of exchange and flow of information as well as the transparence in all directions of the process. We then elaborated the entire documentation and presentation as well as the interactive dramaturgy of the laboratory, trying to keep the demonstration as simple as possible for the benfit of the effect of the collected material. Carsten Goertz is responsible for the entire creative arrangement of the documentation and presentation of d.p.

4. Documentation and presentation

4.1. Creation and fabrication of a documentary CD-Rom

For the complete documentation of the project we first produced a CD-Rom. On a rastered surface every contribution is designed as a symbol. When touching an icon with the mouse pointer, the source and the further treatment of the contribution is shown.
By clicking onto an icon, the respective contribution opens up in a different window and shows the author. All in all, the following perspectives are available:

display of the project on the welcome page, general overview
listening facilities for the original piece of music
presentation of the texts including information on their origins and authors
viewing facilities for the short films without music
viewing facilities for the short films with the particular pieces of music
playing facilities for the music without the films

4.2. The laboratory

In the next step, the entire material has been embedded in a spatial concept of presentation. It is based on a visual surface on which the recipient can freely choose between the different contributions with the help of a controller. He thus becomes a wanderer on paths that are laid out without being calculated or determined. He can navigate freely through the material led by his own intuition, and read the texts while listening to the original music. Likewise, he is free to choose a film score from the final production phase and combine it with any of the films or, again, to fade in a text from the first phase of production. The selected individual path of the recipient through the presented material is visualised as a branched pattern on a screen in the background which is complemented with every new choice.

The composition the laboratory is deliberately plain. Centered in a dark room, we can see a large screen (3mx4m) with loudspeakers to its left and right. In front of the screen, in adequate watching distance, we can find the navigation controller on a small stand. The programme is played by a computer outside earshot and range of vision. The emphasis thus lies on the engagement with the material and the recipient’s game of mind. The equipment as the medium of presentation thereby steps back.

4.3. The catalogue

In order to give the visitor the chance to retrace and comprehend the laboratory also in terms of theory and evolutionary history, a catalogue was designed that functions as a kind of preparation for the actual laboratory. This catalogue contains an introduction, illustrations of the original texts and a list of all authors, filmmakers and musicians including background information.
At the same time, artefacts like drawings, objects, collages and props, emerged from the different processes of work, are displayed in order make the complex working process of d.p. more transparent. The catalogue with its overview of the used materials and media underlines once more the playful character of the exchange processes. With its comments on the variety and origin of the contributions, it also prepares for the visit of the laboratory. Besides, it serves as a guideline for a future exhibition concept.

4.4. Further developments – the exhibition

Partial results of the project have already been introduced to the public during the working process in order to try out the developing material. Gunther Geltinger’s text for example was presented at the Literaturhaus Cologne in October 2004 together with the original piece of music. That way, the product of one phase of d.p. bore fruit in form of a public reading; the text based on the piece of music was thus used by the author in the literary field. Further presentations of the contributions to d.p. are in progress. The authors, filmmakers and musicians are of course completely free concerning the further use of their works.

The film material that was created for d.p. will be edited in order to create an episodical movie named “differing paths”. The original piece of music that I composed in January 2004 will function as a prologue to the film on a black screen.

The original texts (handwritten, typewritten etc.), the printed Emails, the laboratory, the catalogue, the episodical movie and the ten different pieces of music will all be displayed in an exhibition in the end. In its showrooms, all the different paths of the last two years will merge during the time of the exhibition.

4.5. Personal estimation

I would like to stress at this point that, in the different stages of its development, the project d.p. has never been following any didactic intentions, on the contrary: It was supposed to offer experiences to all participants, individual as well as collective experiences, yet not inevitably the latter. Information was freely exchanged, discussed and commented upon, or manipulated and handed on in fragments.
The focus of d.p. was never on the final product, but on its process-related character and on the meaning of each individual step for the project as a whole as well as for the single participant (1).

What makes this project special to me is the observation of the flow of information. Never before has it been possible to demonstrate both the movement and the change of information by different media supra-regionally and promptly (even in realtime) in such a concise way, and to use them creatively. In d.p., Indians in Delhi meet music from Cologne, write texts that are in turn adapted by a London filmmaker so that a Portugese experimental musician can create a musical reaction to the images. A Cologne bicycle courier writes a text for d.p. that is adapted by a filmmaker in Istanbul. A musician then takes the images from this film with him on a concert and rehearsal tour between Switzerland and Hamburg, and finally composes a piece of music in his room just above the Reeperbahn. A filmmaker in Cologne receives a text that was written by a film editor in Delhi as a reaction to d.p. He associates with this text an experience that his own father, also an Indian, had in prison when trying to immigrate into the USA. The score to his film will be written by a Cologne computer musician as well as by an avantgarde saxophone player and composer. None of the participants have known each other before, nor have they been connected with one another geographically or through the membership of the same institution.

-

II. differing paths – an open invitation

1. Personal background

As a musician, composer and sound designer, I have been working opus-oriented throughout the last few years. Sound and image are generated, tested, rejected and created anew on the computer. In the end emerges a programme, a piece of music, a film.
During this working period, I have repeatedly made the experience that the intense and exclusive relation to one’s own project on the computer generates some kind of ‘laptop-autism’. Within such narrow limits, the results of one’s work often come across as deliberately overdrawn, banal, coarse, cryptic and hardly ready to be deciphered or comprehended without personal acquaintance with the author.
Yet, by consciously refusing any dialogue with the recipient, such works of art hardly offer any friction surface for the discussion of current trends and developments. They are either accepted or refused – both being reactions that they, consciously or unconsciously, often provoke themselves. I perceive this autistic way of production as a strong analogy to the outside world in which the predominance of the product makes the individual either withdraw completely into the private sphere or yield to common power structures. A friction surface that evokes communication in form of a dialogue is not wanted here: People who reflect their own position and thus constantly redefine it are neither tangible as consumers nor is their effect measurable as producers.

None of this is generally condemnable or particularly unfortunate. And yet, such trends do raise the question if it is still adequate to conceive a work of art exclusively as a completed product, considering that art is a reaction to an everyday life that increasingly creates disillusioned, community-reluctant individuals without any vision.
In the conventional process of production, the accomplished work of art represents the synthesis of various ideas and thoughts. The recipient is situated at the end of a whole chain of processes that have been filtered and are then shown in form of an extract by the producer. Intermediary levels of artistic production are hardly ever perceivable with this method. The conventional film production for example would try anything to veil the individual working processes of the art departments and make them merge with the work of art as a whole. One could say that the film production dictated by Hollywood is designed as the traditional production of products with a mere consumational value, being purely commercial and without any appreciation for the individual artistic piece in its originality.

Naturally, the creation of art often involves hiding the machinery, the tricks and the technology. In that case, the main purpose is to create a certain ‘magic’ or to maintain the magic of appearance that especially the art of film still believes to possess. Yet, with the reduction of creative processes to only one object, one cannot talk about ‘magic’ anymore in many fields of today’s art production. For what exactly could we still call ‘magic’ at Hollywood or Babelsberg, at BMG or big art fairs – perhaps the unimaginable economic effort, or the waste of individual creative performances?

2. Theoretical approach to the experimental set-up

2.1. The material in process

When conceiving d.p., it was important for me to exchange a very personal piece of music for something else very personal in order to initiate a series of give-and-exchange activities in the field of artistic production. In contrast to the conventional and commercial barter of a work of art, the emphasis here does not lie on the final product i.e. the measurable value (by cash), but on the ‘unprovable’ and indirect investment of time, creative commitment, opulence of ideas and so on.

In the sketch of the work processes of this project,
one might find parallels to the connexion scheme of a synthesizer. I consciously included this process-related idea in my project.
The practice of the synthetic production of sound which always operates with the chain

oscillator – filter – amplification

often follows a similar scheme (2) . This system can be extended into any direction and, because it is a modular concept, it can also form loops within itself. Oscillators can in their turn receive an impulse from the controlling signals, as can the filters be enforced and re-filtered. Besides, the feedbacks that have been an issue of debate in the media arts for years are also feasible in the form of loops.
The experiment set-up hereby becomes the instrument that firstly produces acoustic material.

„In this new music the tools themselves have become the instruments and the resulting sound is born of their use unintended by their designers (Cascone 3)“

To sum up, this is what happens: A signal is generated. A simple wave makes its way through a chain of filters, spreads and is bundled again and can be observed at certain exits.
Whereas the representators of the academic electronics and their supporters like to claim that the synthetic generation of sound is a controllable process similar to the pressing of a key on the piano, other (especially non-academic) people are more intrigued by the possibility to involve the unpredictable and –listenable into the working process.

This inclusion of aleatory elements is not new at all. One can find it in the 1950s and –60s for example with composers like Cage (“Music of Changes”) or Stockhausen (“Klavierstück XI”), and of course, these were not the pioneers (4).
Thus, the instrument provides the facility for the perhaps not infinite, yet certainly not straightforward chain of events. In this respect it is important that the user, though being able to control or manipulate the trigger and the junctions of the chain, cannot always predict the definite result, that is the sound. Preliminary theoretical considerations are able to point out directions within the result, yet the associations remain intuitive, and the result is to be expected with suspense.

„Sometimes not knowing the theoretical operation of a tool can result in more interesting results by -thinking outside of the box-….(Cascone 5)“

One can therefore only know what the sound is like after having passed through the entire chain. While working on the sound, partial sounds emerge from the process and are to some extent not reproducable. One should record them, get to know them and reconcile them with the original idea. The material requests evaluation. Some of these partial sounds might be considered waste or superfluous. Yet, such classification is only used by unimaginative ‘cooks’, for anything can be of use, even the outmoust skin.

„Because the tools used in this style of music embody advanced concepts of digital signals processing, their usage (by glitch artists) tends to be based on experimentation rather than empirical investigation (Cascone 6).“

I have transferred this way of working to the development process and to the form of presentation of d.p. The experiment was thus from the beginning part of a composing and of a learning process; both processes cannot be separated from each other anymore in the proceeding course of the project.

2.2 The reception of the material

d.p. refuses on purpose the process of becoming a product, its final form remaining open to the recipient. The entire work does not aim at one ultimate impression; it is rather meant as an invitation for observing and exploring, for ‘strolling’ in its different layers. Hence, my intention is not to create an untouchable ‘opus perfectum et absolutum’ that stands as a monolith like a juridical or religious text of law. d.p. rather understands itself as an open work in progress (Ecco 7).

The alternative idea of production of d.p. intends a dialogue that can be held between the recipient and the material in the laboratory. This dialogue is always one that is led by the recipient himself, by his conception of the work of art and his requests concerning its options. None of the options offered by the laboratory evokes, neither technically nor through playing with thoughts, the illusion that this relation could be turned upside down. The visitor remains the creative observer and arranger of the material whereas the apparatus ‘only’ provides the material.

-

III. Collaboration instead of cooperation
- d.p. as a model for artistic production

d.p. can be seen as a model for associated artistic production. As the current (January 2006) DADA-exhibition at Centre Pompidou, Paris shows, trends and stylistic developments often result from the exchange of ideas and material, intermedia-wise and supra-regional.

In order to be able to draw a line against the formalisation and control exercised by the outside world, a group of people is needed. In the past, such networks have usually defined themselves according to a certain programme and to the steps of action to be taken. This provided them with both strength gathered from within themselves and with the ability to draw a line against the outside. A classical paradigm for the collective in the last 50 years is the band.
Looking at the band as an example for a collective, one can say that it is self-governing and it provides an internal exchange of know-how as well as a forum for trying out musical and performative ideas. Usually, the band is locally bound which means the musicians are all from the same area and gather for repetitions at a rehearsal room. Besides, such a community offers protection against attacks from an unloved outside world.
These advantages are opposed by factors such as the effort involved (in terms of organisation as well as emotionally), difficulties concerning competence and power, democratic fallibility, no means of retreat and phasing of ways of thinking and acting. For a long time, the band was seen as the ideal of the impetuously powerful creative cell: linked by friendship, united by its own original sound. I have been playing in bands for a long time and would not like to comment on how true or cliché such images are.

I think that this model, at least in its original shape, is outdated. Very few bands like for example King Crimson have managed to express themselves anew on a high level over the years. This process was also based on a certain policy: At the height of success, the collective disintegrated and only reassembled after a long and intense orientation of its members. Even so, we have been attending a massive dying out of bands for some years now. Aged figures hold on to their electric magic wands. While in former times we wanted to believe that they tried to force from the current something powerful, strong, wild, some kind of anti-matter, we now see them with a pacemaker under their chest, wrung out by the marketing of their former opponents. At the same time, rock/pop academies are emerging, in Germany as well as elsewhere. Young bands follow their old heroes suit, only they want to be smarter, take less or ‘cleaner’ drugs, be educated in the media at academies, give better interviews and not die so young like Jimi or Curt or…

Such observations are not new, but they are mentioned here in order to contrast them with another trend, a countermovement. To escape the tangle of collective external determination, many common projects have passed from cooperation to collaboration. Collaboration means a short, project-related teamwork, the encounter being in the foreground. The working process does not have to result in a completed work of art, in a song. Rather has the idea of the session been revived which, by the way, used to be the origin of many bands. The aims of collaboration as defined above are the fusion of machines with conventional instruments, the use of the machine as an instrument, the work with different media, the friction of the different layers and their observation. The awareness of the temporal limitation of the encounter can change the intenseness of the contact and reinforce our observation of the encounter. That way, themes can be brought up and be treated very quickly. The artists are no longer bound to one particular place (rehearsal room, stage, same city), but are constantly on the move and align with others for a short moment. They help each other, exchange information, software and ideas. As a model, d.p. offers the chance to develop new, non-commercial ways of distribution through the collaboration of different participants. Ideas and drafts do not necessarily rely on publication, but what they do need is exchange. Personal reaction instead of academic interpretation offers a strong individual participation, based on voluntariness and the pleasure principle. One finds common grounds in fields where one would not have expected them, and learns new ways of thinking.

The moment of transmission can then trigger further creative processes for a third person. Freedom in the treatment of the material also allows the playful reinterpretation and change of the original. All contributions are thus equal. There is no special accentuation or hierarchy of the media. Music stands next to text stands next to image stands next to music. There are no serving media or historic dominances like that of the eye over the ear. In this model, material gets connected that before and under conventional conditions would not have been composed. Thus, connections are created that are usually only produced with the help of the conventional intersections of the cultural business such as labels, publishing companies, schools, museums and so on. But under these conditions, the connections would probably not have been created at all, because such institutions are subject to a tight programming which excludes ideas and thus either blocks their development completely or manipulates them in a way that they can only be perceived as an institutionally shaped appearance. In contrast to that, d.p. allows a greater dynamic which is essential for a free concept of artistic production that is full of ideas.

When dealing with the conventional notion of economic production, one realises that the so-called cultural business is nothing more but a branch of the economy. Whoever submits to its mechanisms will have to yield to the rules of effective production at some point. Furthermore, elevating the playing around with the institutions as a form of art seems to me something obsolete or at least outdated. To me, the results of such art always end in cynicism.

In contrast to that, models like d.p. allow the protection of the actual process of approaching a work for a long time. It only depends on the consensus of the authors if the project turns out to be a video-clip, a public reading with sounds or rather a screenplay in the end. Only they can decide when this consensus is reached, and when the work as such can be presented or published. Instead of focussing on a hierarchic apparatus, the emphasis lies on a game composition that encourages the productivity. This game composition can, but does not have to, be held together by an organiser. The experimental set-up is thus based on a net-like diagram. Like Serres develops Penelope in his model of the communicational net, each point represents a personal assumption. Each path stands for the connection or relation between two or more assumptions, or for a flow of determination between different elements of this empiric situation.

The multitude of connections between the summits inevitably leads to the vision of a reaction. The effect of this reaction has a direct impact on its cause. A new net can develop at any point of the net. Thus, narrative structures become possible that are usually excepted because of the conventional classification and commercialisation of the cultural industry that similarly lead to a narrow categorisation by the consumer. Music or literature? Video clip or film? The artist is permanently exposed to the question which editorial department, which label is appropriate for him and his individual work of art. For without label, without art gallery or publishing company, he means nothing in the long run.

This situation demands strategies that allow the artist to escape trends of standardisation, and to confront them with alternative concepts that emphasise the originality of the work of art instead of its marketing qualities. Because of their versatility, collaborative productions that resort to a heterogeneous pool of materials can be displaced quickly into any field of the media. Thus, themes are created, connected and transferred. I am therefore looking at a net that is in constant development and that - this is crucial - represents an unstable power position. Once activated, it can develop into all possible geographical and artistic directions in the different media. It might establish itself in one particular region, bend to one side or relocate itself. It might satiate itself, overstretch itself and thus collapse. This openness is its chance.

Every trend of creative production has its own school by now. In the end, these schools harden the results and experiences of past experiments and mostly suppress new trends, which is part of their policy, a policy of power.
In the academic sense, the openness of the collaborative system implies its own failure, because the lightness of the connections inevitably leads to what is called a “misunderstanding”, a “misinterpretation” or a “change in style”. Yet, it is this aspect of “failure” that allows the movement. It includes an element of surprise, of pausing, something that I believe to be one of the most effective instruments against professional curiosity.

It is very likely that these networks of creative collaboration produce a lot of things that could be designated as unsystematic superimposing or as chaos. Acoustically, this would be termed “noise”.
“ Noise is a non-periodic sonic event with an irregular time course, which cannot be assigned to a tone pitch. It thus presents a contrast to sound and tone. (8)”


Yet, it is essentially this “noise” from which we eventually extract and compose our songs and symphonies. Noise has been frowned upon in music for a long time. Yet, since the last century we have experienced the inversion of this relation. The noise, the sound outside the classical body of instruments has become the outstanding quality in music and the fourth dimension next to rhythm, harmony and melody.
Noise and sound have been equal materials in music since the 1960s (Karheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, Oscar Scala and many more) at the latest. Besides, the distortion, the feedback of the signal of the electric guitar that originally emerged from an uncontrolled blasting of the amplification, has become the leading signal of a rebellious countermovement and its music. What seemed chaotic, obsolete or a mistake in the beginning has become part of a work of art and then a vocabulary of its own.
This concept can also be found in what Kim Cascone calls the “aesthetics of failure” in new electronics (Cascone 9). He outlines the history of so-called “Glitch”, a special kind of electronic music that works with so-called faults such as clicking, putting out of tune, noise, sounds of the hard drive, distortions and others.

„… it is from that „failure“ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization, noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards are the raw materials composers seek to incorporate into their music (Cascone 10).
…The technique of exposing the minituae of DSP errors and artifacts for their own sonic value has helped further blur the boundaries of what is to be considered music, but it has also forced us to examine our preconceptions of failure and detritus more carefully (Cascone 11).“

Thus, the meaning of the by-product and of the fault are also an issue here. Often, it is especially the work that is generated at the edge of one’s own work that gives an insight into one’s own background and reasons, because such by-products are developed in a lighter, less conscious way.

-

IV. Conclusion and future prospects

With d.p., I started to write out a small idea, a thought, with the help of many participants. Now that the score and the instruments are provided, one can still watch out for the play and the individual works of art.

„(W)hen you get right down to it, a composer is simply someone who tells other people what to do. I find this an unattractive way of getting things done. I´d like our activities to be more social-and anarchically so (Cage 12).“

The structure and composition of d.p. are strongly constructed along the notation and material-organisation of modern music. Originally, the score was the proof of authorship, the evidence for a creator, the work itself. The score bears the hand of the composer.

„A score was an individual ´s signature on a work. It also made unequivocal the author´s claim to the legal ownership of a sound blueprint. „Blueprint“ because a score is mute and others have to give it body, sound, and meaning. Moreover, notation established the difference and immortality of work in the abstract, irrespective of its performance (Cutler 13).
In fact the whole edifice of western art music can be said, after a fashion, to be constructed upon and through notation, which, amongst other things, creates „the composer“ who is thus constitutionally bound to it.(Cutler 14)“

“Newer” concepts mostly turn away from that (see for example Earl Brown, December 1952). What is noted are distances, centres, concentrations, structures, often independent of a particular instrumentation. The interpreter is supposed to become a creator, even if he is faced with a piece of paper that shows lines, dots and words. The composer gives the impulse, makes suggestions, opens a forum.
The headline, the theme and certain directions may be layed out by him, yet their accomplishment and their establishment can and shall be achieved by others (see appendix 02). This is not so much about the proof of authorship of a self-contained, monolithic work, for we are nowadays enlightened enough to know that each work relates to or even uses at least one other work according to content and form.

Maybe we do not have to go as far as Stravinsky who supposedly said,

“A good composer does not imitate, he steals.(15)“

Still, at the moment the authorship is at disposition in many areas because of the developments in art and technology. Just the rapid development of the recording media from audiotape to harddisc and instruments like the sampler question the conventional approach of the composer as the exclusive intellectual author in a way that has never before been the case.

„The concept of owning music is really falling appart (…T)here is simply no technological backing for traditional concepts anymore. Playback, storing, copying, distributing music is effortles. Music spreads like a Virus…(Oschatz 16)“

Pieces of information, no matter if they exist in the form of music, text or image, always spread in a way that can hardly be controlled. They connect, and flood all the conventional dikes and channels. They might drain away in some places, only to resurface at others. Origin and history are still interesting and helpful for the perception and the presentation of something original, yet the present does not allow holding on to the conventional one-dimensional artist-work identification without strong restrictions.
I try to offer a kind of open score, both for the level of finding the material as well as for the later level of making it accessible and useable for others.
The starting point, the pattern, the length of some contributions, the use of the played music as a draft and an impulse for the next interpretor, the summing up of themes and their transmission up to their final delivery for a new interpretation – all of these are essential parts of this score that in the end bears the hand of many authors.

„The musical hierarchy – distinctions that separated composer an performer and listener – will become outmoded.
What will happen, rather, is that new participation areas will proliferate and that many more hands will be required to achieve the execution of a particular environmental experience. Because of this complexity, because so many levels of participation will, in fact, be merged in the final result, the indiviualized information concepts which define the nature of identity and authorship will become very much less imposing(Gould 17).“

At the end of this three years-experiment during which I received an abundance of resonance and feedback, I would like to thank all the participants for letting me be a part of it.

Gerriet K. Sharma, October 2006.

(Translation by Claudia Knött)