Stimme erleben: Apparaturen-Maschinen-Aggregate

About

From the origin of human sound production, to the poetry of phonemes beyond language, to the production of the voice with analogue-machine-hybrids to its slow technical fading out.

The media artist Valie Export visualises human speech-generation in her iconic performance-video work I turn over the pictures of my voice … by using her own voice as artistic material and linking speech as a bodily act to the text that she speaks, the topic of which is also speech.
Martin Riches’s singing and speaking machines are dedicated to the production of speech and voice by mechanical means and enchant us with their intricate mechanics and their visible mechanics. With ghostly vowels and sounds, the Four Voices are singing pieces created especially for them by the Japanese composer Masahiro Miwa.
The sound installation Lautprozess-Raum (noise process space; 1995) by Carlfriedrich Claus, in which several sound and speech processes run in parallel, overlap and are triggered by the movement of the people present in the gallery, creates intense spatial layers of sound.
In Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag’s vocal re-enactment of the once electronic arrangement of a historical sound recording of Schubert’s Leiermann, sung by the ‘heroic baritone’ Hans Hotter in 1943, the context-dependency of experiencing the voice comes to the fore. Sonntag’s work creates an immersive, ambivalent, acoustic, in which history and present become indistinguishably intermingled.
In Mineral Amnesia by Ioana Vreme Moser, the focus lies on the slow erosion of the voice. Through light and time, the sound of digitally stored speech and sound recordings on discarded and reprogrammed historical computer chips shatters – until they fall silent.

Curated by Carsten Seiffarth and Veronika Witte

Infrasound & Body/Sound Sensing
Presentation: Wed 5 Jul 2023, 7 pm

Stimme erleben
Exhibition tour: Wed 19 Jul 2023, 7 pm

Four Voices
Film evening, Presentation, Talk: Wed 9 Aug 2023, 7 pm