art projects

Most of my personal works and project collaborations are rooted in the acoustic sphere, sound tracks or installations as well as radio works. It mostly revolves around the creative challenge to present something invisible like sound in space or how to imagine the wireless space of radio and how it can presented on stage or how it engages within an urban context. Coming from a media art background it always felt to me that to organise one’s own projects and media networks would be a part of the artistic practise. The same rings true for the curating of festivals and other social events. As it all started off with the enthusiasm for own, self-created and -organised projects and platforms as well as the intriguing opportunity to meet face-to-face with the collaborators, with whom one has been remotely working with, as well as other interesting and inspiring people.

The Buchenwald Series

The Buchenwald memorial place is located at the former Nazi Concentration Camp “KZ Buchenwald” in Weimar, Germany. The ‘Buchenwald series‘ includes two works by Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier for cultural projects commissioned by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, as well as one radio contribution to the EU projects Heritage Radio Network (HRN) online magazine:

• Es ist hier eine andere Welt – This here is a different World (2005) – a 4 channel audio installation for the travelling exhibition The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’. Topf & Sons – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens
• Optimistic Disease Facility (2003) – sound design and music for the documentary film about the fine artist Boris Lurie, a co-founder of the art movement NO!Art and Nazi concentration camp prisoner
• Are Museums just digging in the Past? The Buchenwald Memorial – about current-history memorial work in Germany (2005) – including interviews -beside others- with: Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau, Director of the Buchenwald Memorial, Curator of “Topf & Sons: The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’, the Builder of the Auschwitz-ovens”

Tags: archaeology, memorial, radio, research, sound

Buchenwald memorial place

From the foundation’s regulatory statutes:
“The foundation’s purpose is to preserve the sites of the crimes as sites of mourning and commemoration, to provide these sites with a scientifically founded form and outward appearance and to make them accessible to the public in an appropriate manner, as well as to promote the research of the respective historical occurrences and their conveyance to the public. …

At the Buchenwald Memorial, the history of the Nazi concentration camp is to receive priority within this context. The history of the Soviet internment camp is to be integrated into the scientific and museum work to an appropriate degree. At the Mittelbau-Dora Memorial, special attention is to be devoted to the subject of the exploitation of inmates for the production of weapons of destruction. The history of the two memorials’ political instrumentalisation during the era of the German Democratic Republic is also to be represented. …

The foundation’s obligations include the organisation and realisation of permanent and temporary exhibitions, scientific colloquia and cultural events on the national and international level, the educational guidance of the visitors with a special focus on young people, and scientific documentation, research and publication in connection with the work of the memorial.”

Article 2 of the Thuringian Act providing for the establishment of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

source: www.buchenwald.de

photo credits: Buchenwald and Mittelbau Dora Memorial Foundation

Tags: archaeology, memorial, radio, research, sound

Es ist hier eine andere Welt – This here is a different World (2005)

Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

topf & sons, Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

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(short excerpt of the recorded texts in German)

A 4 channel audio installation which was designed for the travelling exhibition
The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’. Topf & Sons – Builders of the
Auschwitz Ovens by the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation.

In this work, actors read text fragments from historical documents. The fragments
come either from letters written by the prisoners in the form of secret
messages or from eye-witness reports at boards of enquiry in 1945 and
after. This work was realised by Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier and Ludger Hennig.

The exhibition has been shown at the following places aside others:
Jewish Museum Berlin, City Museum of Erfurt, Ruhrlandmuseum Essen, LWL
Industrial Museum, Ziegeleimuseum in Lage, Documentation Centre at the site of the Nuremberg Rally.

website: www.topfundsoe hne.de

photo credit: Sabeth Stickforth

Tags: archaeology, memorial, radio, research, sound

optimistic disease facility

Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier was commissioned to design the soundtrack for the film ‘optimistic disease facility’.

A documentary film about the fine artist Boris Lurie, a co-founder of the art movement NO!Art and Nazi concentration camp prisoner.
Directed by Naomi Tereza Salmon.
(c) Buchenwald and Mittelbau- Dora Memorials Foundation
English with German subtitles – 58′ 37” – DVD, PAL

From the NO!art website:
“The life and work of Boris Lurie creates a radical, brusque, and at the same time a poetic cosmos. In New York where Lurie lives within his collages, the experience of the Nazi concentration camps seeps through everything. Apartment studio and laboratory all reflect a very personal artistic view of the past which surrounds him in the present.

After meeting the artist Naomi Tereza Salmon (who lives and works in Germany), at Buchenwald during the retrospective exhibition of his works in 1998/99, he gave her permission to document his apartment, studio and storage space. A dialogue developed, covering a range of issues, mainly about the past, about living in New York, about the Palestinian issue, including discussions on Stalin and capitalism.
The film is a result of this encounter, laconically trying to capture the authentic situation, and was made as a low budget project. Considering the fact that Lurie is the founder of the No!art movement, the making of the film is inspired by its manifest, which presents an opposition to american mass culture and to the commercalizing process of art, putting in question the scene of mainstream and pop art, creating a genuine ideological and fundamental aesthetic approach of its own.

The music, which was composed specifically for this purpose by the German music and internet performer Jan Brüggemeier (pingfm – internet radio broadcasting), serves as an adhesive as well as an interpretative component. An examination of the metaphysical space, focusing on the encounter between the two artists and the experiences of each of them with their immediate surrounding takes place. The film offers no answers but presents the questions which arise in it in a clear way for the viewer to reflect on them.”

More information about Naomi T. Salmon

Tags: archaeology, audio, international, memorial, political, public, radio, research, sound

Are Museums just digging in the Past? (HRN Magazine No I)

Editor: Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier for Heritage Radio Network (EU)

Chapter 06: The Buchenwald memorial – about current-history memorial work in Germany

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Interviews

Rikola-Gunnar Luettgenau, Director of the Buchenwald Memorial, Curator of “Topf & Sons: The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’, the Builder of the Auschwitz-ovens”
Ronald Hirte, Author of the online-project “Found Objects – a picture-catalogue” of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and fellow of the „Media of History / History of Media Ph.D programme at Bauhaus-University Weimar

Keywords

the Foundation memorial-places Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora
exhibition on the company “Topf & Sons”: “The Engineers of the ‘Final Solution’ – Builders of the Auschwitz Ovens”
Ronald Hirte, “Offene Befunde – Ausgrabungen in Buchenwald”[ISBN 3-922618-23-2]
online image catalogue “Found Objects”
audio archaeology, Dr. Friedrich Kittler
Dr. Volkhardt Knigge, director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation

Music

“Concerto funebre for violin and string orchestra” from Karl-Amadeus Hartmann [Cd: 65023 AV]
Random_Inc with “tales outside the framework of orthodoxy #23″ [Cd: ritornell rit 020 c/o mille plateux]

To listen to the complete programme of “Are Museums just digging in the Past?”:
low version

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high version

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Tags: archaeology, memorial, radio, research, sound

pingfm.org

From 2000 – 2006 Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier has been founding member and one of the driving forces of the webcast band pingfm

pingfm.org has been a web based platform for audio/video experiments with impetus on live production of audio and video.

Working with streaming and networked media the members of pingfm have been fascinating by three core aspects: their low-bandwidth aesthetic, their global interaction and their potential to hybridise different media and spaces like club, theatre, concert, installation, radio, cinema and performance.

Back in those early days of live Internet radio and audio/video live streaming it felt a bit strangely anachronistic in the light of the overall trend in digital production because it meant to:
a.) to lower and reduce the sound and video quality and not to increase it and
b.) to face the fact of “electronic loneliness” as online audiences are more diverse and at that time more or less global but still rather marginal.

In order to compensate that pingfm organised events, festivals and conferences like the ping-in-progress-festival in Weimar (2001). It prepared and participated in the NO BORDER-Camp Radio in Strasbourg (2002). It received the Bauhaus University Award and participated in the online event series ‘Fusion’ organised by Jill Scott (aside others). It performed at the Webcastlounge at the ART Frankfurt (2001) organised by Station R.O.S.E. pingfm hosted together with Theaterhaus Weimar the Sleep-Camp at the Kunstfest Weimar (2001). And together with the artist-duo radioqualia pingfm was topic of discussion on the empyre-mailinglist. In 2004 it participated in the Ars Electronica’s long night of radio-art, organised by the ORF Kunstradio.

pingfm has been a member of the Dutch webcast station DFM rtv International, the British webcaster pirate TV and Radio Kinesonus, the Japanese platform for experimental sound. pingfm hosted a weekly 2hrs live show on DFM rtv International as well as 1 hr programme slot on the local FM radio.

In the active days of pingfm the following members were contributing to it:
Zsolt Barat (tech dep & sound), Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier (sound & pr), Mirko Kubein (video), Lars Mai (sound), Lorenz Schmeier (sound in the early days), Sebastian Seidel (first video than sound) and Ute Waldhausen (video & noise)

Tags: buffering, collaborations, independent, interactive, internet, media activism, music, video, webcast

The sound of pingfm

Two live audio webcasts from pingfm for DFM rtv Int from two succeeding Sunday nights in 2005

The first one was a so called ‘translocally’ improvised show, which means that different locations were involved. In this case it were Jan Hendrik Brueggemeier & Jiri Plachy in Berlin jamming together with Lars Mai in Weimar, 2 hrs run time:

pingfm_06_November2005 (ogg vorbis audio!)

The second one took place one week later when Jan did a solo show from Weimar in the style of an electronic music meditation over the three voices of the poets — Jack Kerouac, Ingeborg Bachmann and William S. Burroughs — 1.15 run time:

pingfm_13_November_2005 (ogg vorbis audio!)

Note: As pingfm advocated the application and practice of free media, we chose for the radio shows the open and patent-free OGG VORBIS audio codec instead of MP3 which is shipped closed source and patented.

Three short snippets from live audio webcasts for DFM

bits and pieces from a sunday night webcast on DFM rtv Int from October 19th 2003:

Live on DFM on October 19th 2003 – Part I (ogg vorbis audio!)
Live on DFM on October 19th 2003 – Part II (ogg vorbis audio!)
Live on DFM on October 19th 2003 – Part III (ogg vorbis audio!)

Tags: audio, live streaming, pingfm

pingfm visuals

Ghost in the Machine by pingfm

(from Mirko Kubein’s website: www.madeforfullscreen.de)

PINGFM

It is still hard to describe what it was. Even when we say “pingfm.org has been a web based platform for audio-video experiments with impetus on live production of audio and video” it says nothing about it. We met at the chair for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus University Weimar in 2000 and performed more than 70 streaming sessions with international partners until I left the group in November 2001.

I was totally fascinated by the low-bandwidth aesthetic of the early video on the internet technology. When we invited artists from all-around the globe to stream their matchbox-small videos directly to a big cinema screen via the internet we called it “made for fullscreen”. That motto is still guiding me. And based on my experiences with streaming media I later created the experimental streaming films When Bogart Was Belmondo and Losing A Highway.

Since we have celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2010 we are working on a detailed documentation of the project. You can read my first notes here (only in german).

// Experimental Lab for Audio-Video-Streaming / Approximately 200 hours RealMedia / Project at Bauhaus University Weimar / Member from October 2000 to November 2001 / With Jan Brüggemeier, Lars Mai, Sebastian Seidel, Ute Waldhausen, Zsolt Barat, Mirko Kubein //

Tags: live streaming, pingfm, video

Human perception and virtual realities (H. Maturana)

The cognitive biologist Maturana Romesín and the psychologist Verden Zoeller stress “that for us human beings nothing that we live in flow of our emotioning, whether consciously or unconsciously, is irrelevant or “virtual” in our living.” Humberto Maturana Romesín further expands on his approach to human perception and virtual realities:

“Our nervous system is continuously changing along the ﬂow of our living, and it does so in a manner that is moment by moment contingent on the course of our living, both in our conscious and unconscious, external and internal, relational psychic space. As a result, all that we live, regardless of what kind of living we live, arises in us modulated by the history of our psychic existence regardless of whether this takes place through our living in what an observer might call a virtual or a non-virtual reality. … In other words, as we live them repeatedly, realities that were initially virtual progressively stop being virtual. As features of our culture, they become part of our biological manner of living and, hence, of the non-virtual reality that we live. The problem with virtual realities, then, if there is any, is not how they occur, or if they occur at all, but whether we do or do not like the psychic manners of existence and the cultural transformations that we generate through them. Virtual realities are never trivial, because we always become transformed as we live them according to the emotioning of the psychic space that they bring about in our living, and this is so regardless of whether we like it or not. If we care about what happens to us and to other human beings through what we do through virtual realities, then it is our responsibility to act accordingly.” (Maturana Romesín 2008)

Humberto Maturana Romesín, The Biological Foundations of Virtual Realities and Their Implications for Human Existence,biological–epistemological – biology of cognition, (paper) 18 November 2006

This paper is comprises two appendices from the book “The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love” written in 1994 by Humberto Maturana Romesín and Gerda Verden Zöller (edited by Pille Bunnell). The appendices were written by Hunberto Maturana Romesin in the years 1996–1997. The book is in press with Imprint Academic, and was published 2008.

Tags: human perception, Humbero Maturana, Verden Zoeller, virtual realities

Schizophonic (R. Murray Schafer)

The Canadian scholar R. Murray Schafer voiced a critique by describing radio as source for ‘defamiliarisation’ from the everyday environment. Identified as a sensual alienation by Schafer he portrayed this media experience as ‘schizophonic’. When Schafer coined radio as schizophonic, he criticised the perceptional split of sounds. To him, when recorded, sounds are brought out of the context of their original environment and are broadcast without any further spatial reference to their origin.

“When I originally coined the term schizophonia in “The New Soundscape” I said it was intended to be a nervous word. Related to schizophrenia, I intended it to convey the sam sense of aberration and drama. … A character in one of Borges’ stories dreads mirrors because the multiply men. The same might be said of radio. As the cry broadcasts distress, the loudspeaker communicates anxiety. … Modern life has been ventriloquized.” (Schafer 1973)

This mediative process turns these schizophonic sounds for Schafer into a symbolic-only and dream-like meaning and consequently leads to a sensual alienation.

While I do not agree with all of Schafer’s arguments particular in relation to how he comes to terms with an actual moral judgement of a sensual experience from an ecological point of view. Nevertheless his term schizophonic is interesting to me, because I do consider that a split is taking place in the amplification process of mediation in general but to me this is taking place on a social, political and / or cultural level. Schafer underpinned his critique with a proposal for an alternative format for a ‘radical radio’ (Schafer, 1987). His radical radio calls for a radio that lets nature be broadcast in a field recording manner and beyond any further manipulation in terms of format or aesthetics.

“The plan was to put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and to broadcast whatever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of bird and animals – all the uneventful events of the natural soundscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities.” (Schafer 1987)

And although I share sympathies for Schafer’s proposal for a new and radical radio. I would shift here as well the focus away from the media aided representation of the environment to the aesthetic side of human communication and a possible ‘defamilarisation’ in communication.

R Murray Schafer (1993) ‘Radical radio’, Semiotext(e)16: Radiotext(e), no. 6
R Murray Schafer (1977) The Tuning of the World, Knopf, New York

Tags: r murray schafer, schizophonia

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