Peter Ablinger – THE REAL AS IMAGINARY (2012)
THE REAL AS IMAGINARY
- Voice and Noise, ca. 10′
The Dream of Socrates
A few hours before his death Socrates tells his disciples about a dream which had often commanded him to play music; but he had always understood philosophizing under this music… (told in F. Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music).
Socrates is considered to be the thinker who transferred the judgment of right and wrong, the moral feeling, from the superior instances to the individual. At the same time, a dream of Socrates refers to something just diving into the subconscious, namely that thinking could have something to do with hearing. Because the next 2400 years were carried by the pathos of the “enlightenment”…
But maybe today we live again in a time in which we find out that not the whole code, the whole matrix which is necessary for the preservation of the life on the planet is contained in the individual. So maybe listening again becomes more important than the (individual) look and the (personal) view.
(P.A., Dec. 2006)
The piece consists of the recitation of the text “The Real as Imaginary”, and static noise that almost completely envelops and covers the speech. In every moment of this enveloping, different frequency bands – “windows” – are left open, so that in one case the fundamentals of the language remain uncovered (and therefore heard/guessed) in another case, the sibilants, etc.
During the performance, the language remains unamplified. The noise (mono signal) comes from the speaker, which is positioned close to the spokeswoman.
Peter Ablinger has been engaged in various forms of non-institutional teaching and work with private students. The Austrian artist is one of the few artists today who uses noise without...