“When working with sound as a material or auditory abject, there are a great number of essential prerequisites to consider in order to deepen the intensity of the piece: What is it that makes found this sound more special or intense than that sound?”
Florian Hecker was born in 1975 in Germany. He works with ‘synthetic sound, the listening process and the audience’s auditory experiences’.
What I like about this work in particular in how Hecker explores how sound waves travel through the space and manipulates it to fill the gallery space. Using curved mirrors, the synthetic sounds are reflected and diverted around the room, ‘thus heightening the complexity of the sound installation’. He creates a sound/ space experience -‘constantly changing perceptions of space, the body and themselves’.
I like this work because it is hardly a visual piece of art. It depends highly on the audience’s experience and each experience is individualistic to the person because as the quote says above, every person experiences and hears sounds different to the other. His work emphasizes an active and subjective experience. This idea is further supported as sound is affected by the spatial composition, temperature (factors) of that specific day, making the work active and boundless.
Another example of how Hecker uses a sound environment to address the physiology and the psychology of the listening process itself, is the works Chimerization (2012) and Hinge (2012) which were exhibited together. Chimerization (3 readings of “experimental libretto” in 3 different languages) is played on tripling, doubling and echoes of the sounds. This tripling & doubling gives his work ‘linguistic dimensions‘ which allows him to explore how the audible sounds affects the spatial ‘to investigate the notion of psycho-acoustics‘. Once again, his work is not visually heavy but very focused on the acoustics and the experience.
Sarah K Obina 