Christoph Metzger: on 3 media installations

 

 

Thomas Köner’s media installations Banlieue du Vide (2003),

Suburbs of the Void (2004), and NUUK (2004)  thematize,

in impressively reduced fashion, acoustic and visual perspectives concerned with traces in urban spaces and landscapes.

 

While the titles of the works point to suburbs and the peripheries of centers and the film sequences at first glance create a special melancholy, these are broken up by broad acoustic passages of a polyphonic white noise and by the sounds of playing children. Köner creates breathing images. Acoustic and visual atmospheres blend over, comment upon, and interpret the almost static images. Their black-and-white compositions cite a historical look. Only in Suburbs of the Void – at more than 13 minutes the longest of the works – do colored fields of light break up the monochromatic iridescences.

 

Köner uses sequences of images from webcams as raw material, which remains constant in his basic focuses. He has traces of people and their vehicles come to appearance acoustically, but not visually. The shift from day to night and the influences of the weather give motion to the segments. In this way, in his shortest work NUUK, which lasts just over 6 minutes, he condenses a total of 3,000 individual web images taken from the Internet into one scene. Despite the cinematic motion of the image, it seems like a still photo.

 

With the cinematic panorama, he shows the changing light of the urban scene in time-lapse. The documents condense into almost monochromatic grayish-white film stills. Here, acoustic movements emerge with special plasticity. In the montage of visual and acoustic perspectives, movements take place on the surface of a snow landscape; it is no coincidence that it resembles a projection screen.

The winter scene of the city comes alive as an acoustic atmosphere and thematizes sensory relationships between eye and ear, such as were already described by the English theologian and philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) in his An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709): According to Berkeley, the eye and the ear do not perceive differently. “Sitting in my Study I hear a Coach drive along the Street; (...) By the Variation of the Noise I perceive the different Distances of the Coach, and know that it approaches before I look out.”

 

Köner trades in Berkeley’s window for the camera. Traffic on the nocturnal street leaves acoustic traces – contemporary ones now – that, in their condensation, require artistic montage in order to take on shape. The nocturnal scene calls upon the viewer to grasp the relationships of the artistically composed condensations as a process.

Köner thereby enlarges and reduces the natural relations that would correspond to our direct perception of the scene, creating an artistic difference from the images of the webcams.

 

With the raised standpoint of the camera, he places us in the harsh, dry winter of northern Finland, near the Polar Circle. He thereby reminds us of the preconditions of perception and of the interplay between eyes, ears, and the surface of our skin.

“Constant cold is associated with the deceleration and sharpening of perception. Hearing, too, perceives tones and sounds more clearly. In this way, a boredom arises that is like a door through which one enters rooms.” The impression of boredom is intended. The aspects of freezing and of reduction indicate intense experiences that move acoustic events in particular to the foreground.

 

Köner is inspired by Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom, which recalls motifs of the perception of time among children and youths. And thus the children’s voices in Köner’s works are to be understood as positive ciphers.

Precisely the composed polyphonic white noise offers manifold possibilities for individual listening perspectives that call upon us to hearken beyond our accustomed listening experience. Köner here shifts the significance of the artist in favor of a process.

The viewers, readers, and listeners assume directorship over the work, which is first created in its active completion. His artistic phenomenology is shaped by the investigation of visual and acoustic events that name urban and landscape sujets as the objects of art. Köner’s oeuvre thus unfolds a referential system in which individual elements refer to each other in the manner of cinematic montage.

 

Common aspects can be found in the various emphases of his work; these explore the laws and peculiarities of our perception with the sujet of solitary regions in his media installations. Weather, light, humidity, and their changes determine his staged urban solitudes. His sujets and their technical realization put him in artistic proximity to artists like Michael Snow, Antony McCall, Andy Warhol, James Turell, Richard Long, and Alvin Lucier.

Christoph Metzger

 

Christoph Metzger: on 3 media installations

 

 

Thomas Köner’s media installations Banlieue du Vide (2003),

Suburbs of the Void (2004), and NUUK (2004)  thematize,

in impressively reduced fashion, acoustic and visual perspectives concerned with traces in urban spaces and landscapes.

 

While the titles of the works point to suburbs and the peripheries of centers and the film sequences at first glance create a special melancholy, these are broken up by broad acoustic passages of a polyphonic white noise and by the sounds of playing children. Köner creates breathing images. Acoustic and visual atmospheres blend over, comment upon, and interpret the almost static images. Their black-and-white compositions cite a historical look. Only in Suburbs of the Void – at more than 13 minutes the longest of the works – do colored fields of light break up the monochromatic iridescences.

 

Köner uses sequences of images from webcams as raw material, which remains constant in his basic focuses. He has traces of people and their vehicles come to appearance acoustically, but not visually. The shift from day to night and the influences of the weather give motion to the segments. In this way, in his shortest work NUUK, which lasts just over 6 minutes, he condenses a total of 3,000 individual web images taken from the Internet into one scene. Despite the cinematic motion of the image, it seems like a still photo.

 

With the cinematic panorama, he shows the changing light of the urban scene in time-lapse. The documents condense into almost monochromatic grayish-white film stills. Here, acoustic movements emerge with special plasticity. In the montage of visual and acoustic perspectives, movements take place on the surface of a snow landscape; it is no coincidence that it resembles a projection screen.

The winter scene of the city comes alive as an acoustic atmosphere and thematizes sensory relationships between eye and ear, such as were already described by the English theologian and philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) in his An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709): According to Berkeley, the eye and the ear do not perceive differently. “Sitting in my Study I hear a Coach drive along the Street; (...) By the Variation of the Noise I perceive the different Distances of the Coach, and know that it approaches before I look out.”

 

Köner trades in Berkeley’s window for the camera. Traffic on the nocturnal street leaves acoustic traces – contemporary ones now – that, in their condensation, require artistic montage in order to take on shape. The nocturnal scene calls upon the viewer to grasp the relationships of the artistically composed condensations as a process.

Köner thereby enlarges and reduces the natural relations that would correspond to our direct perception of the scene, creating an artistic difference from the images of the webcams.

 

With the raised standpoint of the camera, he places us in the harsh, dry winter of northern Finland, near the Polar Circle. He thereby reminds us of the preconditions of perception and of the interplay between eyes, ears, and the surface of our skin.

“Constant cold is associated with the deceleration and sharpening of perception. Hearing, too, perceives tones and sounds more clearly. In this way, a boredom arises that is like a door through which one enters rooms.” The impression of boredom is intended. The aspects of freezing and of reduction indicate intense experiences that move acoustic events in particular to the foreground.

 

Köner is inspired by Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom, which recalls motifs of the perception of time among children and youths. And thus the children’s voices in Köner’s works are to be understood as positive ciphers.

Precisely the composed polyphonic white noise offers manifold possibilities for individual listening perspectives that call upon us to hearken beyond our accustomed listening experience. Köner here shifts the significance of the artist in favor of a process.

The viewers, readers, and listeners assume directorship over the work, which is first created in its active completion. His artistic phenomenology is shaped by the investigation of visual and acoustic events that name urban and landscape sujets as the objects of art. Köner’s oeuvre thus unfolds a referential system in which individual elements refer to each other in the manner of cinematic montage.

 

Common aspects can be found in the various emphases of his work; these explore the laws and peculiarities of our perception with the sujet of solitary regions in his media installations. Weather, light, humidity, and their changes determine his staged urban solitudes. His sujets and their technical realization put him in artistic proximity to artists like Michael Snow, Antony McCall, Andy Warhol, James Turell, Richard Long, and Alvin Lucier.

Christoph Metzger