Artist Statement

INTERFACING SOUND/SOUND SCULPTURE

For 15 years, Timo Kahlen has investigated “immaterial” phenomena in numerous wind installations, sound pieces and experimental media works. His most recent sound sculpture, Media Dirt (2004), will be created especially for exhibition in Kiasma.

“Media Dirt consists of three glass cylinders (approx. 152 cm high), several loudspeakers (on the floor inside the cylinders) and the gurgling, whispering, hissing, singing, “dirty” sound of radio interference – the nomadic, temporary, immaterial noise and beauty found in-between radio stations. The radio interference – constant radiation that occupies the apparently ’empty’ air that surrounds us all the time – creates a complex, artificial, purely technological but seemingly-natural setting-with references to insects whirring through the air, to birds singing. In this way, the glass cylinders become the laboratory for a reconstruction, a new abstract form of ‘nature'”
_Werner Ennokeit                                                                                                  staubrauschen.de/soundsc.htm

• Timo Kahlen was born in Berlin in 1966. He studied art at the Hochschule der K Berlin from 1985 – 1994, graduating with a Master of Arts. He held a lectureship on Visual Media/Video at the art departments of the Humboldt-Universitat and the Hochschule der K Berlin from 1993 to 1998.
  http://staubrauschen.de/soundsc.htm

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