Over the summer I had the amazing opportunity to go to Berlin, Germany for 6 weeks for a faculty lead study abroad program! There I worked with Dr. Kristopher Holland with a group of 10 other artist’s and thinkers. Dr. Holland has been a mentor for me for the last couple of years pushing me towards art as inquiry over expression. We spent the months before we left reading Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and Jean Luc Nancy’s The Sense of the World as starting points to change our way perceiving this new space, Berlin. The goal of the trip was to make a cohesive project using the readings (both fantastic reads,by the way, worth all the agonizing pain of self doubt and nihilism that comes with each sentence) to a site specific theory of perception and the reality of being in Berlin. I, even though liking both of the texts, decided to not solely base my artistic research only on these two texts, on a couple of others. Here’s the list
Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise by Greg Hainge
Listening by Jean Luc Nancy
Silence by John Cage
Listening to Noise and Silence: Towards a Philosophy of Sound Art by Salome Voegelin
These books have helped me work on a new working (in progress) theory of noise, art, technology and ontology. Ultimately I plan on writing an essay of this theory after graduation. For now I will continue on the visual research of this theory to better understand what I am trying to say, how it relates to art practices, and theory studies in general.
So what did I make in germany? Not as much as I would have liked, but resources for a printmaker were slim to none. I practiced my drawing skills daily, wrote and read a lot. The last 4 weeks there we spent the days in the studio working. Simply put I made a table. I don’t wish to go into huge amounts of the table due to its failures during the show. However I will touch on what I did learn from the process of making the table, specifically the image. First here is the table.
The goal of the table was to make the viewer take a beer, drink said beer, then use the empty bottle in interaction with the table and interpret the image as a graphic notation of a musical score. The original image was a found, noisey pattern inside a old brick in Berlin. I also found these great small little music boxes where they had blank strips where one could punch out the score and then it would play it. I bought 3 of them to process my image. This was my result.
So how did I use the music boxes in this process? I took the image and made a bitmap with the frequency of 5 producing large round dots that abstracted the image but as you got further way it produced the image more clearly. Like most bitmaps. Then took 3 strips, one for each box, and punched out the bitmap over 10 inches, producing a score completely out of the image. here’s what it sounds like.
This is where I think the real important work that I did over there happened. I have plans with another artist, Jeanette Nuxoll, to make a large scale one back in Cincinnati, hopefully to maybe produce moving images and sound!
Overall my experience in Berlin was unforgettable. The city, the people and the art were all fantastic and beautiful. I hope that it isn’t my only time to visit such a great city.
_AK_
Andy Knolle 