Gerhard Eckel's Art Projects

Fenster is a video-driven sound installation conceived for the Galerie Stadtpark. A video camera captures what visitors in the gallery can see through the window front facing a small street. By means of real-time image analysis, the movements in the image are extracted. The mostly horizontal movements of different speed and direction are typically caused by cars, bicycles, and pedestrians passing by. The movement data is then used to control the spatial sound textures projected by 6 speakers positioned in front of the window. Fenster can be understood as a kind of sound track for a silent movie that shows everyday urban life.

More: images

N.N. is a photo series and work in progress. It was initiated at my stay as artist-in-residence in Krems and while developping a sound installation with the same title. The project is a reflection on the role of the window metaphor in the development of media since the Renaissance. The work tries to draw connections between the theories of perspective and painting developed in the 15th century, and more recent media such as photography, video, graphical user interfaces, computer animation, virtual and augmented reality.

IMPULSE / RESPONSE is a sound environment inscribed in the Rotunda, the Large Hall and the adjoining exhibition rooms of the Essl Collection. The work aims at highlighting the multi-faceted acoustic situation in all its colours and nuances. The sound material used in the environment has been conceived and adapted specifically for this spatial context. For the duration of the exhibition "Visions of America", a generative process explores the various possibilities of sound arrangements in time, constantly producing new variants. An acoustic antenna composed of 4 loudspeakers projects the sounds in various directions into the Rotunda from where it reaches the other rooms. IMPULSE / RESPONSE is a kind of interrogation by musical means of the exhibition space. The acoustic emptyness of the exhibition space is filled with vibrant silence.

Elevator Pitch is a video piece consisting of two indepent loops - an image and a sound loop. The different duration of the two loops causes them to "beat" with a very slow rate. The piece is moving through phases where the sound is almost in sync with the image and phases where they are seem completely unconnected. Image and sound where recorded in sync. Whereas the concrete image was not processed in any way the concrete sound was processed in order to achieve a degree of abstraction matching the one of the image.

Steiner Landstrasse 3 is the address of the building where the ateliers of the Artist-in-Residence Krems program are located. Having spent half a year there made me very conscious of the special soundscape in this part of the street. I chose 34 min 8 s from a recording I made through the open window of my atelier on August 12th 2004. Using a simple compacting process, which consists in mixing the first half of the recording with the second half, I condensed the original recording into a series of 11 "instant versions" with increasing density. The durartions in seconds of the 12 tracks on the CD are: 2048, 1024, 512, 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, and 1. The densities follow the reverse sequence from 1 of the original sound to 2048 of the 1s condensed version.

Realization of Peter Kubelka's experimental film "Arnulf Rainer" (1958-60) with Max/MSP/Jitter using Kubelka's score published in "Peter Kubelka", ed. Gabriele Jutz & Peter Tscherkassky, PVS Verleger, Vienna 1995. Fred Camper writes that the film is "composed entirely of frames of solid black and solid white which Kubelka strings together in lengths as long as 24 seconds and as short as a single frame. When he alternates between single black and white frames, a rapid flicker effect is produced, which is as close as Kubelka can come to the somewhat more rapid flicker of motion-picture projection; during the long sections of darkness one waits in nervous anticipation for the flicker to return, without knowing precisely which form it will take. But Arnulf Rainer is not merely a study of film rhythm and flicker. In reducing the cinema to its essentials, Kubelka has not stripped it of meaning, but rather made an object which has qualities so general as to suggest a variety of possible meanings, each touching on some essential aspect of existence."

In cooperation with Beat Zoderer, Ramón González-Arroyo, and Oswald Egger.

LISTEN, the latest development in the area of Audio-Augmented Reality, is the result of an interdisciplinary project which has received support from the European Union. As one of five partners, the Kunstmuseum Bonn is presented as part of the exhibition Beat Zoderer - The False Bottom is Deeper Than One Would Think - the new technology of radio headphones as an artistic medium. Beat Zoderer has created the walk-in installation Raumfaltung ("Folded Space") for LISTEN. After three years of successful cooperation between the Kunstmuseum Bonn and three international research institutes along with a private company, as well as with the artists Gerhard Eckel, Ramón González-Arroyo (music), Oswald Egger (text) and finally Beat Zoderer, the outcome of this collaboration has been presented at the center of the exhibition, which unfolds a powerful space established by gigantic monochromatic surfaces of color along the walls and upon the floor. The audience is plunged as it were into a panorama of color and sound creating impressions which - in response to the choreography defined by one's own personal path through the room - vary, modulate and repeat themselves in such a way as to ultimately cohere into an artistic whole. In this manner the audience comes to participate in an intense synaesthetic experience of body, space and sound.

In cooperation with Ramón González-Arroyo and Oswald Egger.

The audio component of the Raumfaltung installation is composed of several layers forming an infinite flow of sound. One of these layers, the "Underground" layer, combines the elements of the text ("Wortsätze") written by Oswald Egger with a universe of synthetic sounds composed by Gerhard Eckel and Ramón González-Arroyo. While exploring the room, the visitor will be discovering different elements, single moments, or smaller segments of this "Underground" layer. The sounds of this algorithmically composed music-flow, including the recorded text elements, have been categorized into different types, called Auras. One can imagine them as a palette of sound-colours. "Mit offenen Auren" (With Auras wide open) is an independent version of the "Underground" layer specially composed for the CD, where the world of Auras reveals its unfolded form. Although this piece, which could have been called the Aura Suite from the Raumfaltung installation, has been conceived for headphone reproduction, it may also be played over loudspeakers. The text has been spoken by Katharina Hinsberg and Oswald Egger.

In cooperation with Martin Rumori, Daniel Teige, Eckehard Guether, and Maximilian Szcepanski.

"Grenzenlose Freiheit" delegates the control over the evolution of the sonic process to up to three visitors at the same time. This is acomplished by using small wireless networked computers (PDAs), which are handed out to the visitors when entering the installation. Sound material originating from different contexts gets overlayed, shrunk or stretched. By using the PDAs, the visitor controls the realtime sound synthesis process. He or she also determines the position in space where the sound projection takes place. The installation is inscribed into three contiguous rooms and uses 24 loudspeakers for the sound projection. See more details can be found at the project website www.grenzenlosefreiheit.de.

Poème Spatial was created for the inauguration of the 40-channel Audiodome sound projection system conceived by Aeldrik Pander and Gerhard Eckel for the Multimedia theatre ANIMAX in Bonn / Bad Godesberg. The installation uses the 40 loudspeakers as individual sound sources creating clouds of spatially distributed granular sound textures. Avoiding traditional panning techniques allowed for an uncoloured projection of the mildly processed (by transposition and filtering) and mostly concrete sound material. The installation was presented in almost complete darkness (only a small and dimmed light bulb was suspended from the ceiling in the center of the space) in order to avoid any visual reference to the real acoustic space. The installation created a very strong sense of an acoustic space much larger than the theatre's real space. The illusion would only cease when exciting the room by other sources, e.g. a handclap. Then the very dry natural acoustics of the space was perceivable as well, creating a very paradoxical situation to the ear.

In cooperation with Joachim Gossman and Ruth Diehl

"LISTEN" is an audio-visual installation which has been presented at the Kunstmusem Bonn from March 31st to April 29th 2001. The minimalist installation consisting of a video monitor and two loudspeakers, intends to increase the auditory awareness of the visitors. In a museum, which is dominated by visual artifacts, the "LISTEN" installation creates a space that irritates at first, but then stimulates reflection and invites contemplation. Being confronted with an almost empty room directs the attention towards the act of hearing - i.e. to paying attention to sound, as John Cage has formulated it. The video monitor displaying the world "LISTEN" visually underlines the focus on the auditory through a paradox. When entering the installation space, the visitors become the audience of a transitional soundscape located at the entrance of the room. Two loudspeakers placed at ear level to the left and the right of the door opening reproduce a sound piece which functions as an acoustic threshold. The piece is based on the whispered word "listen" recorded in different variations and arranged into a quiet sound texture. A bench in the middle of the room invites to sit down for a few minutes and open one's ears to the museum sound environment, which usually remains inaudible.

"Gehäuse" (German for box, cabinet, cage, case, package, or housing) is a sound installation commissioned by the Donaueschingen Festival. The installation was part of the concert installation "Especes d'espaces" produced by Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin. The piece was inscribed in the 4 rooms of the vaulted basment of an old library building in Donaueschingen. Each room was dressed with 4 loudspeakers lying on the floor and facing the vaults. The audience could saunter through the four rooms, which were arranged 2 by 2 along a corridor. Sound textures moved through the rooms, luring people from one space to the next. The piece made use of the complex acoustic situation created by the vaults. The special and fine-tuned positioning of the speakers created a very uniformly distributed and complex sound image composed of a plentitude of phantom sources created through vault and wall reflection.

"Camera Musica" is a virtual sound installation which was presented in the context of the Expo2000 world-wide projects at the ANIMAX Multimedia Theatre in Bonn / Bad Godesberg in 2000. In "Camera Musica" the audience explores a visual and an auditory virtual space in a 3-sided CAVE projection system equipped with an 8-channel 3D audio display developed at Fraunhofer IMK. Equipped with 3D glasses and using a stearing wand, the visitors could float through a virtual architecture of semi-transparent boxes which are inhabited by different sound textures. A physical modelling system related the position of the visitors to the the forces determining the positions of the boxes. This is how a seeminly tactile and perceptually very plausible sense of immersion and interaction could be achieved. The sound textures also change in reaction to their moving containers, who's state of equilibrium is constantly disturbed by the presence of the (moving) visitors. Everything is kept in motion and it is the motion that drives the sound textures.

An electronic 8-channel version of Sculptures Musicales by John Cage has been realized for a concert organized by the KMN Berlin which took place at the Konzerthaus Berlin on September 3rd 2000. Eight loudspeakers were installed on seats among the audience and facing the ceiling of the small hall in the Konzerthaus. The sculptures were produced in real-time with a Max/MSP program running on a G4 Mac controlled by a G3 PowerBook. Cage scored the piece by the following text:

"Sounds lasting and leaving from different points and forming a sounding sculpture which lasts" (Marcel Duchamp) An exhibition of several, one at a time, beginning and ending "hard-edge" with respect to the surrounding "silence", each sculpture within the same space the audience is. From one sculpture to the next, no repetition, no variation. For each a minimum of three constant sounds each in a single envelope. No limit to their number. Any length of lasting. Any lengths of non-formation. Acoustic and/or electronic. John Cage, 1989.

More: Sound excerpts of the 7 sculptures (mp3) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

"SoundTube" is an real-time generated 8-channel sound environment conceived for the t-u-b-e sound gallery in Munich. SoundTube has been produced in situ and in reaction to the specific acoustic environment of the vaulted space. Based on a large repertoire of sound material, sound proccessing and projection processes, the sound environment was inscribed into the space in a few days. Following the utopian concept of open form, "SoundTube" is an installation allowing the audience to individually explore the sounds spread over the room. The goal was to mold sound and space into a unit, which can be perceived differently at every spot in space and time. The theme of the piece is the resistance of mechanical objects (or volumes of air) which have to be overcome in order create sound through motion. This concerns especially the interaction between these moving object and our body, as we don't only hear with our ears.

"Traverse" is an improvisation for viola and computer created by Vincent Royer and Gerhard Eckel for the opening of the "Viola Spezzata" exhibition in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (June 2nd 1999). The computer is used as a kind of instrument played live by Gerhard Eckel using sound material recorded with Vincent Royer in the context of their "Catalogue" project. "Traverse" was chosen by the music jury of the International Computer Music Conference 2000 in Berlin to be performed at the conference and to be released on the ICMC 2000 music CD.

More: Recording of the premiere (mp3), ICMC 2000 Program note

"Viola Spezzata" is a futher development of the "Stele" adapted for the installation in the Kunstmuseum Bonn (June 2nd - July 11th 1999). Whereas the "Stele" was conceived to be presented in a larger and empty space with well-balanced acoustics (e.g. ZKM's "Kubus" studio and concert hall, where it was created), the "Viola Spezzata" is inscribed into the particular acoustical, architectural, aesthetic, and social setting of the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The vertical structure of the "Stele" was not any longer pertinent in this new context and a horizontal arrangement was chosen instead. Visitors of the museum are confronted with a minimalistic sculpture lying on the floor and projecting sounds towards the ceiling. Every hour the "Viola Spezzata" plays for nine minutes and then releases the visitors again to the silence of the museum.

More: Invitation, Program note

Kinetic Sound Sculpture Stele
St. Augustin / Karlsruhe (Germany) 1998

In the kinetic sound sculpture "Stele" sonic and sculptural elements are blended to form a hybrid object. The sculpture's static visual aspect and its dynamic acoustic appearance form thereby a powerful contrast, which mutually intensifies the two components. On the one hand, the eight loudspeakers piled up to a fragile column serve as building blocks of a minimalist (archi)tectonic sculpture, on the other hand their linear arrangement constitutes an acoustic prism with very peculiar sound projection characteristics. This arrangement was inspired by video sculptures using monitors as building blocks. There the monitors function not only as individual displays, but also as cells in dynamic image textures. An attempt to transpose this concept into the acoustic domain led to the linear arrangement of loudspeakers forming an acoustic antenna. The acoustic radiation pattern of the antenna can be controlled dynamically by means of a computer program. The particular acoustic characteristics of the "Stele" account for its enigmatic air brought about by a new approach towards projecting complex sound textures in space.

More: Program note (in German), Images

Music Installation CM96 (Camera Musica Sketch)
Paris (France) / St. Augustin (Germany) 1994-1996

Considering the idea of open form as one of the most fascinating concepts of twentieth century music composition, I see new opportunities to approach this utopia by the means of modern media technology. Compared to the classical concert situation, where musical texts realized by composers are interpreted by musicians in order to be received by the listener, the installation situation offers a fundamentally different presentation framework for music. The listeners are free to actively position and locate themselves in space and time, thus giving way to listening conditions less constrained than being bound to a seat in a concert hall. Exploring a music installation is much closer to contemplating visual art work than attending the thread of directed musical discourse in a concert. The installation situation allows listeners to more directly experience the openness of a composition because they may affect its unfolding, a privilege which was reserved to only composers and instrumentalists in the past. But how to offer this access to the untrained listener who is neither composer nor instrumentalist? Only the most intuitive interface referring to every-day experience as anybody can assumed to be acquainted with will insure the necessary ease and subtlety of navigation. In the installation Camera musica I will use the notion of a remotely controllable (virtual) camera as a vehicle to visually and aurally explore a potentially open composition. By the means of a projection-based virtual reality system, listeners will explore a three-dimensional music space with the same ease and intuition as they would walk through a park. The different objects they will encounter in this space and the various situations they may experience are set into relation with the structure of the music produced while wandering upon. Thus Camera musica uses virtual reality technology not mainly for its immersive capacities but as an intuitive interface to explore complex and ambiguous musical relationships.

References: [18], [28]

Sound Installation Sound Spheres
St. Augustin (Germany) 1997

Sound Spheres is a sound installation conceived as a part of the virtual environment caveland. The installation explores the basic features of the CyberStage audio-visual display system with the aim of shaping some of the yet unstructured vocabulary of musical expression and experience in cyber space. The concentration on a few fundamental aspects of integrated audio-visual simulation was a conscious decision in the design of the installation and led to its abstract and minimalist character. In essence, sound spheres is about localization of moving sound and light sources. The role which direct and reflected sound and light play in the perception of space is explored in an experimental context.

When entering the installation, we are left in complete darkness and silence. With a virtual flashlight we start to explore our obscure situation. While scanning the surroundings with the light beam, the scene slowly appears to our imagination. By pointing the flashlight in different directions we become aware of a big striped sphere enclosing us as well as several smaller rotating spheres slowly moving along circular paths. Then we discover how to activate these small spheres by inflating them with a virtual pump attached to the flashlight and operated by a button on the flashlight. The more we inflate a sphere, the longer it keeps on emitting percussive sounds and light flashes in regular rhythmical patterns. The omni-directional light flashes show us the entire scene for brief instants and the reflections on the shiny spheres help us to locate the light sources. The percussive sounds emitted synchronously with the light flashes excite the virtual room acoustics and provide us with a sense of distance and direction. The more spheres are active at a time, the denser the complex light and sound patterns will be. But pointing the virtual pump at a sphere for too long a time will lead to its explosion accompanied by a violent detonation flash and noise. While freely floating in the space of weightlessness between the flashing and sounding spheres, we experience an ever changing rhythmical tissue of spatialized sound and light. The perception of this space remains fragmentary and obscure due to the transient nature of the auditory and visual evidence leaving plenty of room for our imagination.

Sound Research Project Catalogue
Banff (Canada), Sankt Augustin, Karlsruhe (Germany) 1995 (in progress)

Catalogue is a project carried out in collaboration with the alto player and composer Vincent Royer whom I met at the Banff Center for the Arts during a residency in 1995. Both being interested in new string instrument playing techniques, we started this project with the goal to develop a catalogue of specially recorded sound material. The material is intended to be produced and recorded for our individual compositional projects. The first recording sessions took place in Banff in 1995. Other sessions followed at GMD's AudioLab in 1997. In 1998, ZKM started to support the project by putting its high-end audio recording studios at our disposal. The material recorded so far was used in Royer's Chinook II, a composition for violin, alto, and 8-track tape and for my kinetic sound sculpture Stele.

Music Installation en face
Paris (France) / Karlsruhe 1993 (Germany)

Music installation realized for the media festival Mediale 1993 in Hamburg (Germany). Presented in the context of the symposium Interface II. Realized with the support of ZKM, Center for the Arts and Media Technology Karlsruhe.

Excerpt from the program note:

I consider the sound installation as an important alternative to the temporal and spatial constraints of perceiving music in concert halls. Aesthetic concepts such as indeterminacy, openness and ambiguity find their adequate expression more likely in the relaxed environment of an installation than in the traditional concert situation. The possibility to occupy different spatial and temporal position while exploring an installation allows the listener to take more actively part in the listening process. This constellation matches with my intention to shift the attention in my compositional work from the construction of final processes towards a disposition of possible situations. The listener's freedom to move around in the space structured by the installation allows for a confrontation with music which shows similarities to the way visual art is perceived. In reaction to what is heard, the listener may change his or her position in order to focus the listening on certain aspects - an approach similar to reading a painting. But en face does not have a visual component since it is concerned only with the act of listening. The only relationship with visual art can be seen in the way the sound material is projected or displayed. Even the seemingly paradoxical possibility to influence the temporal structure of music is part of the concept of installations: There is no beginning and no end and every part carries characteristics of a whole, which never appears as such - remains imaginary. Sense does not emerge after a complete presentation of the parts but is already seizable in the fragments. But it will be blurred by other fragments, in order to reappear again on another level through the relationships linking the fragments. The resulting ambiguity which constantly gives rise to new interpretations of the allusions presented, shows the absurdity of all attempts to gain a state of clearness and security. en face uses synthetic sound material as well as transformed natural sounds, in order to blur the source of the sound and the conditions of its production. This adds yet another level of possible interpretation. It is thus the immaterial characteristic of synthetic sound material which is the basis for the composition of ambiguity.

References: [22]

Concert Installation Dispersion
Vienna (Austria) 1989

Concert installation for sound sources, microphones, loudspeakers, time delays, filters and mixing console. Commissioned by the Wiener Konzerthaus for the Cage-Projekt 1989, February 25th, 1989, where it was performed in parallel with the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Variations II by John Cage. The latter, performed by the percussionist Elisabeth Flunger, was used as sound source for Dispersion. The central idea of the piece is Cage's concept of undeterminacy. Dispersion can be thought of as a mechanism to fragment already articulated sound material. Temporal rearranegment of the recorded sound material by means of time delay units opens up new fields of structural relationships. A computer generated score is to be executed by a musician on a mixing console. Since the effects of the prescribed manipulations become audible only after a long delay, any kind of interaction, interpretation or improvisation is prohibited by the nature of the piece. The temporal fragmentation mechanism determined by the score is independent from the input sound material and thus the result is undetermined but not arbitrary.

References: [6 ], CAGE-Projekt Arbeitsbericht (in German) at Karlheinz Essl's web site.

Composition Der Zufall geht
Vienna (Austria) 1986

Computer generated tape composition. Realized at the Institute for Electroacoustic and Experimental Music (ELAC) of the Hochschule für Musik und darstellende Kunst in Vienna on the computer music system AKA 2000. The only sound material used to realize this piece is the clicking sound of two colliding billiard balls lasting for a few milliseconds. Derivates of the original sound were produced by various sound tranformation techniques and the resulting sounds were grouped in families. Markov processes were used to form "clouds of sound" of different density and texture. On the formal level of the piece, an articulation of macro and micro time structure was attempted throught the use of (abstract) models of excitations and resonance. The piece is recorded on the label "Classic Amadeo" on the disk "Österreichische Musik der Gegenwart, Elektroakustische Musik 1, 30 Jahre Elektroakustische Musik" (472 039-1).

Composition Come una certa espressione parlante
Vienna (Austria) 1985

Composition for piano and tape recorder. In collaboration with the composer Karlheinz Essl (Vienna). Composed in summer 1985. First performances in November 1985 (Kremsmünster, Ebensee, Linz) at the Festwochen in den Bundesländern, organized by Kybernikos, Association for New Music and Multimedia Performance and sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Culture. In this piece, a tape recorder serves as an instrument taking active part in the musical discourse. The tape recorder is played by a musician who uses it to record and play back fragments of the piano part.These fragments are reproduced either in their original form or by manually controlling the movement of the tape. The latter playback mode offers a rich spectrum of interactive sound transformation similar to "scratching" techniques on vinyl records.

References: German description of the piece at Karlheinz Essl's web site.

Assocication Kybernikos, Association for New Music and Multimedia Performance
Vienna (Austria) 1985

Founded in 1985, together with the composers Eugen Brochier, Karlheinz Essl, Gerhard Robert Hauser, Werner Jauk, Hannes Heininger and Walter Schweiger. Sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Culture and the Austrian Section of the International Association for New Music. Kybernikos' activities were concentrated on the synergy of art and technology with special respect to New Music and Multimedia Performance. Kybernikos organized several concerts, seminars and workshops.

Soundtrack Abanaleballade
Vienna (Austria) 1984

Soundtrack for the animation film Abanaleballade by the painter Gerlinde Thuma (Vienna). Realized at the animation studio of the masterclass of the painter professor Maria Lassnig, Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. In this film it was attempted to explore different possibilities of temporal organization of a medium which combines visual art and music. Intense experimentation work, also with other artists of the animation studio (e.g. Hubert Silezky) had an important influence on the composition of this soundtrack. The film has been shown at several international film festivals.