“...every perception appears to threaten an intermingling with the object: 'That’s rain. I could be the rain’ [...] this wall. I could be the wall. – Generally it’s terrible to be a wall”, wrote Norman Oliver Brown in Love's Body in 1966. In his sound installation Marco Preitschopf produces the same blurring effect as regards the perception of the work and the perception of what the observer generates simultaneously from within himself – his own melody. He uses the different phenomena of psychoacoustics and resonance to construct a complex acoustic sculpture. A primarily language-based reception of the work is thus increasingly undermined. Ultimately, the brain is directly stimulated and responds immediately to the surrounding, specific, manipulative air pressure: the sound.

Preitschopf spans two white PVC tarpaulins on top of each other horizontally in the room. With the help of these tarpaulins, referred to in technical language as the »black soul«, he implants in the wall-less exhibition room a diaphragm indicating a release in the form of two mutually reflecting projection areas. The sound material, as the occupation of this empty medial space, is gathered exclusively from the recording of a speaking voice, for which an artist’s text serves as a model. After being processed, the spoken word is transferred to the realm of psychoacoustics, i.e. into the world of effects and acoustic artefacts. As a result of certain errors the brain generates its own melodies from what it has heard. These phenomena of resonance – the reproducing and simultaneous producing of an echo in the observer – does not rest on the voluntary will of the listener, since it is a kind of subtle perceptive coercion.

Marco Preitschopf [b. 1967] studied painting at the Karlsruhe State Academy of Fine Arts from 1991 to 1997. He received numerous scholarships, including the Heinrich Klotz Scholarship of the Society for the Promotion of Art and Media Technology and those awarded by the Schloss Solitude Academy, the Bonn Art Fund and the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation. His installations have been shown in the Galerie Bärbel Grässlin in Frankfurt, the Galerie Thomas Riegger in Karlsruhe, the Baden Art Association in Karlsruhe and the Projektraum sub11 in Munich. A CD entitled speechific gravity [ZKM Karlsruhe / Edition Solitude] is being issued in conjunction with the exhibition.

Credits

• Margit Rosen (Curator)

Organization / Institution

ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst