Research Installation | 2016

[structural noise 1]

If you walk past Hitler’s birthplace, you just walk past it. It’s barely noticeable. The street where it is located looks like any other street, and sounds like any other. However, the smudges on the facade, presumably washed away graffiti, is visually reminiscent of audio tracks. In this “research station”, the pictoral information of the coated wall parts is read out and reproduced as sound.

The presentation of structural noise 1 is intended as a research station. It is a complete workstation with laptop/computer and speakers on a desk in front of a chair. The viewer of the piece has the possibilty to sit down at the desk and interact with the station: Start or stop playback of the audio information, adjust the frequency range, volume and other parameters and select specific points in the image.
This form of presentation is intended to revive the starting point of artistic research. The processual quality of the work is shown, there is no definitive statement. The title, structural noise 1, not only refers to the expression of the optical through the acoustic, but also makes reference to a possible research series through the numbering. The work is therefore not the result of such a work, but its possible beginning.
No new technology has been invented, but rather a historically charged material is being tried to transform into a technical research object. The existing technology is being used to tear out the original meaning, in this case Hitler’s house of birth, of its importance, its shape and its location and to focus on the wall structure as such. However, the background cannot be switched off.
It was deliberately not the entire facade, since it is not about the appearance of the house, but about the formal association of the soundtracks. As a research station, the work allows us to think about other facades or structures that we would like to analyze in this way.
The work represents my first piece in the field of artistic research.
The presentation of all artworks of the excursion Blue Skies for Art Based Research took place on January 27th, 2016 as part of the presentations of Time Based Media studies, Art University Linz.