Markus Decker, Dietmar Offenhuber, Orkan Telhan

‘Dust Serenade‘ is a reenactment of an acoustic experiment done by German physicist August Kundt. Inspired by the Chladni’s famous sand figures visualizing sound waves in solid materials, Kundt devised an experiment for visualizing longitudinal sound waves through fine lycopodium dust; a setup that would allow him to measure the speed of sound in different gases.

Kundt was a strong believer in experimental methods over purely theoretical inquiry in a time when the disciplines of theoretical and experimental physics started to diverge.

‘Dust Serenade’ intends to remind us the materiality of sound. Tubes filled with scraps of words and letters–cut-up theory–interact with sound waves and turn into figures of dust. Here, visitors can modulate the frequency of the sound emitted by moving a rod and create different harmonic sound effects. As sound waves figure, refigure, and disfigure the text, we invite visitors to rethink about the tension between their theorical knowlegde and the sensory experience.

Dust Serenade is one of a series of interactive sound projects that enable visitors to experience the physical aspects of sound, presence, and atmosphere. Works in the series have been shown at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Zagreb, Istanbul and São Paulo.

The project was funded by the Council for the Arts at MIT and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture (BMUKK)

In Netzpioniere, an art-historical project contextualizing the practice of early net art, SemaSpace is used for exploring the social structure of the early “Thing” network, a central hub of the early net art scene. In the project, also the synchronoptic timeline conceptualized together with Mar Canet Sola is used.

You can visit the project and the visualizations

The second project, Facing Science conducted at the Humboldt University Berlin, explores the social structure of scientific collaborations across different disciplines and countries, a part of the WeltWissen exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau Berlin. Tim Otto Roth also made a nice documentation page for the application.

Link to the project

our project page and a related post on WMMNA

Photo: Pez Hejduk

update: an article in derStandard

SemaSpace was first released in 2004 and actively developed until 2010 by Dietmar Offenhuber & Gerhard Dirmoser.

the 2004 homepage

the source code of the program

more description on the LBI homepage

Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Media Art Research

“The long backwards tracking shot through a trench in Kubrick’s WWI drama Paths of Glory, which follows the general as he paces along the line of soldiers and his repeated questions, are reduced to their pure geometry in Dietmar Offenhuber’s study: Nothing is visible other than various accumulations of points, a line on the ground on which the “spent” frames are counted off in units of 50, and the camera’s movement, though the original sound can be heard. While this represents enough data to identify the take, the scene’s most important element is missing, the physicality, the bodies of the things and people. But at the same time this reduction is in a sense closer to the first industrialized war in history than the images of Kubrick’s film.

In its abstraction the trench reveals the thing it necessarily lacks: experience. The industrialized killing machine dehumanizes, desubstantializes humans per se. The soldiers’ corporality, they become functional values, the trench’s materiality, it becomes a matrix of points, and both are surveyed by the camera’s mechanism, the single-frame transport. Solely the talking remains analog, but this is equally stereotypical, and merely affirmative of the scenography.

Virilio, who frequently mentions the “fraternity” of modern warfare and cinematography, would not be able to get anything from this process. It is precisely the conscious reduction within the film, the purely mechanical, geometric values which are able to reveal the true violence of this war. The fictionalized fact is not necessary, removing the sense from existing images suffices to return to the historically factual qua techno-imagination (Flusser). The viewer sees less but learns more. The new form reveals content which is also more important to the image’s rhetoric.” - Marc Ries, translation: Steve Wilder

“paths of g” in sixpackfilm’s catalog

Credits:
paths of g (1.27 min)
basierend auf “Paths of Glory” (1957), Stanley Kubrik
Animation: Dietmar Offenhuber
Audio: from the original Film

Awards: Jury Award Melbourne International Animation Festival 2007

Screenings, Exhibitions: VISIONary – Innovativer Film aus Österreich – Stadtkino Wien, Moviemento u.a.; Atelier Graphoui, Brussels; Light-Cone, 17.-20.9. Paris; European Media Art Festival 2007; Videonale 11; Resfest, Vienna; London International Animation Festival; electrofringe festival, Australia; Melbourne International Animation Festival 2007; Lille 7th International short film Festival, France; Crossing Europe 2006, Linz; BALKANIMA festival 2006; Diagonale 06, Graz; Seoul International Media Art Biennale 2006

with Nina Wenhart

The Munich based label bodensatz came into possession of the tapes, which they kindly made available to us as raw material for our film.

The videofootage has been recorded by seven individuals portraying their private spaces. Technically, a modified videocamera with a mirror ball for recording a 360° image has been used

Credits:
video: dietmar offenhuber, nina wenhart, with recordings from roland keil,peter brandl, birgit benetseder, karl offenhuber
sound: sam auinger with material from the “heinz k. aus h.” sampler bodensatz records (www.bodensatz.de)

special thanks to benno zehetmaier