IMA | lab No. 15

During an artist in residence stay in the studios of the ZKM | Institute for Music and Acoustics, sound artist and composer Hanns Holger Rutz will be working on the improvement and formulation of a new method of composition for electronic music. The objective is to design a compositional process on the basis of Gottfried Michael Koenig’s analytical approaches that combine various temporal modes. In this way concepts are shifted over one another that had previously been disconnected, such as composition-performance, offline-real time, live audiotape music electronic sound installation.

In discussion with Ludger Brümmer, Hanns Holger Rutz guarantees fascinating insights into his method of working by way of several sound examples.

Hanns Holger Rutz

In his more recent works, sound artist and composer Hanns Holger Rutz (* 1977) thematised the materiality of writing processes: does something like a tangiable quality of apparently abstract ideas exist such as that of algorithm? Is it possible for material traces which emerge in the hiatus between concept and symbolic unity to be observed and to render the latter dispensable?
Hanns Holger Rutz studied at the electronic studio of the TU Berlin, ammong other with Franz Martin Olbrisch, Trevor Wishart, Hans Tutschku, Gottfried Michael Koenig and David Behrman. He worked as an artistic colleague at the Studio für elektroakustische Musik (SeaM) in Weimar and, since 2009, as part of a PhD at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research ICCMR) in Plymouth taught the possibilities of temporarally following processes of composition. In 2012 he was Guest Artist of the RONDO Atelier of the state of Styria, Austria. Since 2013 he works in the research projects of the Institut für Elektronische Musik und Akustik (IEM), in Graz. His works comprehend both generative sound installations and intermediate works with video and dance, as well as electro-acoustic audiotape compositions and computer-based improvisation. In all works the design and development of algorythms, special artistic software, as well as the interaction with the computor as semi-autonomous counterpart play an important role.