Heike Sperling
rand

Being different, 1970-86 (1981) by Anna Oppermann, single canvas, photo emulsion on canvas, hand-coloured.

Workshop @ Academy of Art and Design Basel

TEXTFILMSOUNDZITIERCOLLAGEN
April 9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th, 2021

Rasso Auberger invited me to give the 4-day workshop at HyperWerk (Institute for Postindustrial Design) in Basel. HyperWerk is one of the institutes of the Academy of Art and Design in Basel. The students at HyperWerk are trained in complex process design to initiate and shape the social changes of the future.

Had the great pleasure and honor of co-teaching with Ralf Neubauer.
We named our workshop TEXTFILMSOUNDZITIERCOLLAGEN, and introduced the students to the estate of artists such as Mark Leckey, Arthur Lipsett, and Anna Oppermann.

Ralf and I also invited Phantom Kino Ballett (Sarah Szczesny and Lena Willikens) to talk with us about their deep and transformative performances. We asked Lena and Sarah how they managed to evolve their content, visions, and techniques during the pandemic.
And finally we read All about love by bell hooks as well as This is water by David Foster Wallace with the students.
The students worked in teams to compose a found footage-based experimental short film.

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Issue No 2 of "grapefruits", a fanzine about female* composers and sound artists by Elisa Metz, Nathalie Brum, Elisa Kühnl, and Theresa Nink.

grapefruits

Fanzine about female* composers and sound artists.
February 22nd, 2020

As an assignment in one of my seminars Elisa Metz, student at the Klang und Realität master program, developed the fanzine grapefruits on female [*non-binary] composers and sound artists from scratch.

Her idea for a fanzine emerged after reading the list of female composers which I compiled for a seminar at Institute for Music and Media. Elisa Metz was inspired to learn more about the work of all those composers and sound artists mentioned in the list, and after listening and researching many of them it became important to her to spread their names through a fanzine as a pop-cultural format.

The fanzine’s name refers to the 1964 artist's book Grapefruit by composer and artist Yoko Ono. Ono saw grapefruits as a hybrid of lemons and oranges, a metaphor for her own identity – always being in-between.

Elisa  Metz invited her friend Theresa Nink as well as fellow students Nathalie Brum, Elisa Kühnl, and Anna Schütten to collaborate. During the summer 2019 they released the first issue called Imaginary Sound.
The second issue Performance was released this month at the Palastrauschen event at Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The fresh issue features AMET, Laurie Anderson, Junko, Annea Lockwood, Julia Mihály und Phew.

In 2019 and 2020 grapefruits was presented during different events, exhibitions, and festivals, such as Brückenmusik 25, Currents – Festival für aktuelle Tiefkultur, Electronic Music Home, Giftshop at Bruch & Dallas and MEKASUBA in Cologne as well as Sparda’s Palastrauschen at Museum Kunstpalast in Duesseldorf.

If you would like to receive a copy of grapefruits, if you have any questions or suggestions, if you would like to write for grapefruits or invite the editors/writers, do not hesitate to contact them at hello@remove-this.grapefruits.online

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Tobias Frei

Social Sincerity
February 19th, 2020

One of the milestones of digital technologies is the possibilty to constantly exchange data between more than half of the world‘s population. But there is an invisible problem for our societies. The platforms, which use the technology to connect people, are not neutral. What began as a race to monetize our attention now bursts important pillars of our society, e.g. mental health and social relationships. The motion design short Social Sincerity by Tobias Frei addresses those issues and wants to raise awareness especially with a young audience.

Social Sincerity is the final year project of Tobias Frei in the Motion Design post-graduate program at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, and was supervised by my co-chair Alexander Hanowski and me.

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Henning Himmelreich

After Silence
January 28th, 2020

The motion design short After Silence by Henning Himmelreich addresses the inner process of mental and emotional regeneration of human psyche. To visually represent this process the film uses the imaginary from Egyptian mythology and its concept of the journey into the afterlife in an abstract manner.

The process of self-purification is visualized through both abstract and direct representations of deities and other mythological images, combined with modern graphical elements.
The protagonist is trapped in an uninhabitable world reigned by chaos, which is a visual representation of her own state of mind. As she enters subconsciousness, a mixture of self-reflection and external judgement makes her undergo self-purification. By passing all stages successfully and facing her demons she reaches a state of perfect harmony that purifies the soul. The world around her changes correspondingly and darkness becomes light.

After Silence is the final year project of Henning Himmelreich in the Motion Design post-graduate program at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, and was supervised by my co-chair Alexander Hanowski and me.

After Silence won at several international festivals e.g. "Best Sound Design" at 2nd GLOBAL INDIA INT'L FILM FESTIVAL (Pune, India); "Best Experimental Short Film" at 3rd Maracay InternationalFilm & Video Festival (Maracay, Venezuela); "Best Experimental Film" at 1st baltic independent film Festival (Mechelinki, Poland); "Best Experimental Film" at 3rd Canadian Diversity Film Festival (Toronto, Canada); "Best Experimental Short Film" at 4th Canal de Panama International Film Festival (Panamá, Panama).

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Martin Fütterer

SEVEN ROOMS
December 12, 2019

SEVEN ROOMS is a complex, abstract music film by motion designer Martin Fütterer. The short film visualizes the electronic music by Philip Mou, and stages it in several different rooms which were conceived in Cinema 4D. Field recordings meet digital synthesizers, and instruments meet programmed sounds. SEVEN ROOMS combines video recordings with digital animations.

SEVEN ROOMS is the diploma project of Martin Fütterer in the Motion Design post-graduate program at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy, and was supervised by my co-chair Alexander Hanowski and me.

Martin Fütterer won third price at the German Art Directors Club with this stunning Visual Music project.

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Lambert Windges

Ich war die Wellen, doch dann sah ich sie an.
April 1st, 2019

The sound and light installation Ich war die Wellen, doch dann sah ich sie an. [I was the waves, but then I looked at her.] by Lambert Windges takes the emergence, presence and disappearance of varying circumstances in a polyrhythmic structure as its theme.

Inspired by the dualistic interpretation of various phenomena in our lives, in his work Lambert Windges describes a perspective that seeks to observe these phenomena and at the same time to uncouple them from their dualism through the neutral standpoint of observation. The audience is invited to embark on a hypnotic journey, where the boundaries between opposites subtly blur.

Ich war die Wellen, doch dann sah ich sie an. [I was the waves, but then I looked at her.] by Lambert Windges is his final project as a Visual Music major at the Institute For Music And Media of the Robert Schumann conservatory. Marcus Schmickler and I supervised the project.

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Laurenz Ulrich

hörst du mich?
March 6th, 2019

In the interactive installation hörst du mich? by Laurenz Ulrich either collages of video and sound recordings merge into opaque chaos or visitors are offered new perspectives by means of extending and slowing down.

Außen und Innen. [Outside and Inside.] To be bubbling over and have control of yourself. Beset by countless influences. The view of the individual. Stress and inner peace. The installation hörst du mich? offers an analogue telephone to make links between these states. Laurenz Ulrich's voice recordings serve as supporting elements. They are based on texts from various works by Walter Benjamin, Wolfgang Koeppen, Siegfried Kracauer, Christian Kracht, John Dos Passos and Rainer Maria Rilke. Visitors can listen to these texts on the telephone receiver.

hörst du mich? by Laurenz Ulrich is his final project as a Visual Music major at the Institute For Music And Media of the Robert Schumann conservatory. Marcus Schmickler and I supervised the project.

Laurenz Ulrich is particularly grateful to Yannick Benavides, Alexander Borowski, Jakob Ertl, Laura Greco and Philip Sudheimer for their support during the video documentation.

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Suhyun Park

Eins & Viel
February 23rd, 2019

Suhyun Park describes her interactive installation Eins & Viel [One & Much] as a “granular playground consisting of rice, staples, instruction cards, and algorithm.”

The installation consists of two tables, grains of rice, staples, and small cards with instructions on them, which encourage the audience to interact with the setup, as well as two microphones and four speakers. The sounds recorded with the microphones are processed by an algorithm in Supercollider and played over the speakers in real time. Suhyun Park writes about the audience’s interaction with her work: “You are as unimportant as rice, staples, or as the other. But at the same time you are very important. You have fun and experience every moment differently.

Eins & Viel by Suhyun Park is her final project as a Visual Music major at the Institute For Music And Media of the Robert Schumann conservatory. Marcus Schmickler and I supervised the project.

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rand

The fabulous poster was designed by the best graphic artist in Germany, Chris Rehberger of Double Standards.

Visual Music Studies 2019

Annual show of student's Visual Music projects
February 1st, 2019

Every year composer Marcus Schmickler and I host the show Visual Music Studies at Dusseldorf's Filmwerkstatt. This year Sebastian Fecke, Johannes Leppkes, Suhyun Park, Laura Rizzo, Magdalena Treutwein, Laurenz Ulrich, Lambert Windges, and Valentin Zuckmantel will show their pieces on February 13th.

Creating a work for this show is part of the assignment in my Visual Music class at the Institute for Music and Media at Dusseldorf Robert Schumann conservatory. Many of the students decide to show a transmedia installation, but some of them are also interested in video clips, experimental film and animations, as well as audiovisual performances.
Have a look at the best projects of the past ten years.

The students are supported by an amazing team of assistant professors: Prof. Ulla Barthold, Falk Grieffenhagen, and Christian Schäfer.

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Jannis Hannover

Raumbewegungen
April 2nd, 2018

The Raumbewegungen project by Jannis Hannover is concerned with the sonification of environmental data. The focus of the study is the public space, which is created and used by human beings, and the way it changes physically within a particular time span. The sonified environmental data include temperature, air pressure, humidity, vibrations in the ground, CO2 levels, and movement. The translation of the fluctuating environmental data in an open space into sounds yielded an abstract composition, which made the constant reconfiguration of the environment audible. In addition, it provides the new soundtrack of a synchronized and alienated film of the place.
The result is an audio-visual interaction between electronic, abstract sounds and a video, which demonstrates the influence of people on the characteristics of their immediate environment.

Raumbewegungen by Jannis Hannover was an exam project for the Visual Music major at the Institute For Music And Media of the Robert Schumann conservatory. Marcus Schmickler and I supervised the project.

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