Artist Statement 

Interactive sound installation: music stand, photography, strings, screen, computer, loudspeakers.

The installation consists of a music stand with a photo of a guitar on it. The strings of the guitar, though, are real and connected to a computer on which several samples are stored. You are invited to pluck the strings, which are both the notation and the instrument. As the music is stored physically as data in the computer, you perform music via an interface, which is programmed by an algorithm.In addition, your performance is recorded by a Kinect camera and displayed on the screen on the wall. As the images of the performance are data, the configuration of the visual data can easily be influenced by the configuration of the acoustic data. Sound and image are synchronized with each other. Thus, when you are in front of the music stand, you see your mirror image displayed on the screen. The moment you start performing with the music stand, your image distorts into a flow of visualized acoustic data.

Software development Nikolaus Völzow, sound and interface design Derek Hauffen 

[source: zkm.de]

• Peter Weibel [1944-2023] was born in Odessa, USSR. He was an internationally known Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet but soon jumped from the page to the screen within the sense of post-structuralist methodology. Thanks to this linguistic input into his visual media works, Weibel developed a critical impulse that turned against society and the media, while investigating virtual reality and other digital art forms. Since 1999 he has been director of the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. [source: Wikipedia]