Stick Drums-Music By The Sea

There are round photo discs on speakers, which look like low pedestals. Each disk shows the contact of the tip of a stick, extremely bent under tension. The photos on the disks show different ground structures (paving, asphalt, natural stones, concrete) of the coastal protection measures. In order to be able to see the photos up close, the listening observer moves between the sources of sound and thus practices spatial hearing, since all speakers work simultaneously. Through proximity and distance to the object of perception, the listener experiences permanently changing rhythmic dominances. The overall volume is adapted to this process and is just loud enough so that the installation can be heard as a sound field.

My idea is not simply to create an ecological necessity as an aesthetic translation from the natural material (somewhere destroyed by the storms, that is, woven-in branches of spruce, which then float for a long time in the water and come ashore somewhere), but to deal with the properties of the material used itself (curvature, flexibility, sound production). Although the branches are thin, the sea is the object of my observation. In this context, the driftwood has an indicative character of something inevitably arriving, by and through the sea. The sea sometimes rushes, or thunders and brings back some of what has been thrown into it (the visible things). The round photos on the speakers show the surface structures of the places where I found the sticks. Visually, the tip of a stick touches a surface. Acoustically a tip of a stick drums on a surface. All round sound sources together create a music, similar to a polyrhythmic crescendo of all stick drums at the sea.

• Ressource Kunst, Die Elemente neu gesehen.

• Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1989

• Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken 1989

• Lothringer Strasse, München 1989

• Palace of Exhibitions, Mücsarnok, Budapest 1990

250 bent and knotless spruce poles; 14 circular photos; cables; 14-channel composition; electronical equipment