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Themesicon: navigation pathOverview of Media Articon: navigation pathAudio
 
Klang Fluss Licht Quelle – Vierzig Säulen und ein Raum (Kubisch, Christina), 1999Very Nervous System (Rokeby, David), 1986Speaker Swinging (Monahan, Gordon), 1994
 
 
 

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Neuhaus installed sound sources which could be heard along a road via the car radio, thus subordinating time to space. For the first time in the history of music, musical form was no longer primarily temporal art, but rather it was based on space. Temporal sequence ensues from three factors: The distribution of sound sources (mostly loudspeakers) in space; the individual path of the user, which in installations in public space is molded by everyday needs; as well as the frequently underlying temporal structure of the sounds, often obtained from environmental influences, for example in that brightness, volume or physical movements influence the development of sound via sensors.

Christina Kubisch also works with the temporalization of real space. «Klang Fluß Licht Quelle» (1999) is part of a series of sound installations at which visitors wearing special induction headphones hear sounds out of cable structures and then assemble them to create an individual sound composition. In addition, Kubisch also often refers to the historic content or the background elements of existing rooms by using sounds that could once be heard in them or by accentuating an atmosphere unique to a particular place.[50]

 

David Rokeby's «Very Nervous System» depicts motion in Euclidean space in musical dimensions—therefore a non-Euclidean space. In this respect his work represents a continuation of the attempts at intermedia transformation, however it possesses a further level. In the version installed in 1995 in the «Eisfabrik» (independent exhibition venue for media art—ed.) in Hanover, one could lead the ticking of a free-hanging alarm clock into roaring feedback loops by starting it to swing. The crux here was to fathom out an invisible, unseizable space that is consistently elusive, because any transformations can only be arbitrary.

Gordon Monahan's performance «Speaker Swinging» (1994) describes the way back from electronic into physical space. Static sine tones are rotated in space by three performers swinging loudspeakers on long ropes around them in a circle. The monotone sine tones obtain an unimaginable vitality through the Doppler effect and the complexly varying reflections and interference patterns. This is enhanced by the corporeality of the perspiring performers and the menacing character of the misused loudspeakers tearing through the room. Monahan demonstrates that

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