Klänge gegen die Krise

Der Futurist Luigi Russolo erfand in den 10er und 20er Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts die Intonarumori (zu dt. „Geräuscherzeuger“).  Die akustischen und mechanischen Instrumente bereicherten die musikalischen Ausdrucksmöglichkeiten eines Orchesters um das Geräusch, das dadurch erstmals zum musikalischen Gestaltungselement erhoben wurde. Nicht zuletzt deswegen gilt Russolo als Vorläufer der Musique concrète. Andere Künstler aus Frankreich, Ägypten und Nordamerika entwickelten die Klangkomposition als Kunstform weiter.

"Elektronische Musik" als Komposition begegneten wir erstmals in den 50er Jahren, im Studio von Karlheinz Stockhausen in Köln. Das war der Beginn einer fruchtbaren Partnerschaft von Musik, Kunst und Technologie, und die Geburtsstunde der Ton-und Videokunst, die wir als Mischform heute mit den Begriffen audiovisuell oder multimedial bezeichnen.

Seit Stockhausen stehen Künstler aus Deutschland exemplarisch für die Weiterentwicklung dieser Symbiose. Neben dem Rheinland, in dem neben Stockhausen auch Kraftwerk wirkten, war stets Berlin ein Hotspot der elektronischen Musik in all ihren Formen. 1954 wurde an der Technischen Universität Berlin das Studio für Experimentelle Musik gegründet, mit seinem Einfluss auf die Elektronischen Musik in den 70er Jahren bis zur heutigen Clubkultur und den Festivals für experimentelle und atonale Musik in der Hauptstadt. Aufgrund der Corona-Pandemie liegt die Clubkultur am Boden. Die Künstler aber setzen ihre Klangexperimente fort.

Die Arbeit besteht aus einer Überarbeitung von Nahaufnahmen von Filipa Tojals Gemälden, die als Künstlerin ebenfalls am Programm bei SCOPE BLN teilnimmt. Massimiliano Cerioni verarbeitet ihre Bilder mit Hilfe der Codierung und künstlicher Intelligenz zu einem eigenen Soundtrack. "Es gibt im Lockdown wenig äußere Anreize eine Menge Unsicherheit über die Zukunft“, sagt Cerioni. "Wir müssen uns dem als Künstler stellen und nicht entmutigen lassen.“

Filipa Tojal, Inner Landscape

Acousmatic Works
by Massimiliano Cerioni
massicerioni.bandcamp.com/album/acousmatic-works

SCOPE BLN

www.scopebln.org/

SCOPE BLN Artists-in-Residence (AiR) program
www.scopebln.org/artists-in-residence

By Alice Ioffrida
Technological development has always conditioned art and music, more than ever in the XX century, beginning with the pioneering noise music of the futurists Russolo. Later on, there are various examples of tape and concrete music coming from France, Egypt, and Northern America, marking the birth of the composition of sounds as a form of art itself. Similarly, we encounter the expression “Electronic music” for the first time as a description of the composition activity of Karlheinz Stockhausen (among the others) at the Studio für Elektronische Musik in Köln during the 50s.
Today music, art, and technology continue their partnership by combining their respective fields known as sound-art and video-art, a blend described as audiovisual or multimedia.

Since the Köln breakthrough, Germany kept developing this music and tech partnership. Berlin itself has always been supporting the electronic music culture in all its forms, from the foundation of the Studio for Experimental Music at the Berlin Technical University in 1954, through the birth of the Berliner Schule der Elektronische Musik in the 70s, until nowadays with its clubbing culture and experimental festivals. Due to Corona, today the city is on hiatus, but the artists continue their avant-garde research.

Among the many projects stopped due to the pandemic, there are instead artists who have taken advantage of the moment like the Italian Massimiliano Cerioni, who arrived in Berlin during the lockdown and is following the artist residency program of SCOPE BLN, where he is currently developing his new projects. This seemingly endless isolation can have different impacts on the creative process of each artist. In Massimiliano's case, solitude was already part of his productive routine, which switched from a very social and outward activity to a more private and intimate moment, necessary to process what the previous external stimuli suggested to him.

In fact, the artist considers the last year the most prolific of his career in terms of production, and yet he remarks how even in this forced isolation he had to keep feeding his creative impulse through sharing of ideas and experiences with others – as much as was allowed. «Since the pandemic began, I have had strong moments of personal and spiritual crisis, but at the same time, I can say that I have lived the most productive year of my life, as the ascetic parenthesis helps writing. I love to compose, to give shape to sound and visuals with the support of the technology.
On the other hand, I need sociality, and that’s why I also perform, mostly with augmented electronic instruments. Performance is the most human and least structuralist part of my making art, in which gesture, improvisation, and extemporaneousness have a prominent role. It is my way of creating a more direct relationship with the public, which often as a composer or video artist I don't have because I work so much behind the scenes» Massimiliano says.

The first project on which Massimiliano dedicated his residency is Simbiosi, an audio device coded by himself, compatible with the electronic music software known as Live, made by Ableton – also based in Berlin. Simbiosi was officially launched on the 29th of March.
His next work is an audiovisual installation called Inner Landscape, as an homage to John Cage’s piano work In A Landscape. The work will be screened on April 24th and it consists of a reworking of close-up pictures of Filipa Tojal’s paintings, she is also a resident at SCOPE BLN, exhibiting from the 19th of April. Massimiliano processes these images with the aid of coding and artificial intelligence and creates a dedicated soundtrack. His residency will last until June when he’ll have his solo exhibition.

In short, despite the closure and constraint, the lack of stimuli, and uncertainty about the future, Berlin continues to inspire, and artists do not allow themselves to be discouraged by these hard times that we have to face.
The SCOPE BLN residency and its artists are organizing and scheduling a series of events and are continuing with the artistic and multimedia experiments that they will present online but also in person by appointment.