An SichImages/Silence 


Virtuality in today's world of communication presents us with a number of problems: the danger of dulling the senses, the loss of perceptual capacity through oversaturation and the danger of loss of reality.

Things are increasingly no longer perceived in themselves, directly, but mediated. Reality is often no longer sufficient to be seen as worthy of perception at all. Media such as television only allow communication in one direction; realities are primarily experienced through prefabricated images, no longer directly. Life is being lived out, one's own life is becoming more superfluous. Communication via computer replaces direct encounter.

Perception is provided with images of images.

A simple example shows how such mediocrity is also common in music practice:

Acoustic instruments are often imaged via loudspeakers. The transformation of the instrumental essence is accepted. Amplification via loudspeakers is not seen as a reproduction but as a magnification of reality. Often it is no longer felt as a distortion that the radiation characteristics of the sound source are destroyed by loudspeaker reproduction, that the direction of the sound and the timbre are changed. A situation arises in which the real appearance, which exists at the same time, is covered by the virtual one.

Such thoughts about virtuality on the one hand and experiences with problems of buried perceptual readiness on the other hand through musical composition overflowing into all too abstract heights, which creates distance to the musical object itself, led to the project :












AN SICH is an instrumental play. In a reversal of the usual situation, the violent actions take place in the auditorium. The stage stands for concentration, beingness and solitude. The actions are repeatedly sucked into the stage space in a kind of internalisation. The auditorium thus represents actionality, environment, overflowing with visual and acoustic images, external movement, virtualisation of the environment. 

The realisations of these virtualisations happen on stage in a withdrawal from artificial worlds.

Photos

Klaus Rabien