Galerie Neu is pleased to present TEMPLEXTURES, Florian Hecker’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
With TEMPLEXTURES*, Hecker extends his ongoing work by dramatizing questions about the human listening process and the encounter with the material of sound through computer-generated spatial compositions, charting uncategorizable auditory sensation.
Technology is listening for itself and increasingly also for us. But what do machines and codes hear, and what do they hear that humans cannot? Drawing upon current research in machine listening, Hecker stages the deployment of virtual listening agents, reversing strategies initially developed for the analysis of sound into means for synthesis to render audible their “intelligence signature, the signal trace of their nonhuman brain-ear”**. Using computational audition, Hecker’s new sound piece exposes degrees of perceptual resolution hitherto inaccessible via human listening – suggesting notions of synthetic sound as an immaterial situated between machine languages and sensual encounter at the fringes of measurability and the unnameable.
Staged against a backdrop of functional acoustic wall panels, TEMPLEXTURES D (2022), a single-channel, computer-generated sound piece, is diffused through an industrial column arrayloudspeaker system, which segments the signal into two differently directed acoustic beams. Consisting of a vast dictionary of sonic material produced with a novel algorithm for texture synthesis developed by Axel Roebel and members of the Analysis/Synthesis team at IRCAM, Paris, TEMPLEXTURES D’s full scope exceeds the course of the exhibition. A sequencing logic designed by Hecker’s long time collaborator Alberto de Campo navigates and transforms this database of auditory similarities and perpetual differences into an audible stream of an individual scéance, commencing at every full hour.
Perceptual textures are also at the core of Induction (red/green) (2022), a new wallpaper piece, deepening Hecker’s ongoing investigation of quasi hallucinatory environments. Produced in collaboration with the design studio NORM, a typographic pattern abstracted from visual “background” textures created by the Italian Memphis Group for their print publications, Induction (red/green) is both calibrating and destabilising, acting as a mute transitional piece, a retinal antechamber to TEMPLEXTURES.
List of Works
1.
Florian Hecker
Induction (red/green), 2022
ASCII pattern wallpaper
dimensions variable
2.
Florian Hecker
TEMPLEXTURES D, 2022
1-channel computer generated sound, software, Meyer Sound CAL 64 loudspeaker and acoustic panel system
duration variable
Florian Hecker (b. 1975, Germany) works primarily with synthetic sound, the listening process and the audience’s auditory experience.
Recent solo exhibitions and performances include Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, Simian, Copenhagen (2022); Resynthesizers, Fitzpatrick-Leland House, Los Angeles (2021), Synopsis / Seriation, CU Art Museum, University of Colorado Boulder, CO, USA (2018); Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Synopsis, Tramway, Glasgow (both 2017); FAVN, Alte Oper Frankfurt; Formulations, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main (both 2016); Formulations, Culturgest, Porto; A Script for Machine Synthesis, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and at the Maison de la Radio, Paris; and those at Künstlerhaus Graz, and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (all 2015); Galerie Neu/MD72, Berlin; documenta 13, Kassel; and Nouveau Festival, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (all 2012).
Hecker’s discography includes: Synopsis Seriation (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2021); Statistique Synthétique (GRM Portraits, Paris, 2020); Inspection II (Editions Mego, Vienna & Urbanomic Falmouth, UK, 2019); A Script for Machine Synthesis (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017); Articulação Sintetico (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017); and Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (Pan, Berlin,2015).
*An expanded multidimensional entity for uncategorisable auditory sensation, templexture refers to synthetic sound generated through the use of texture synthesis processes, coupled with concepts stemming from machine listening whose architecture resembles spectrotemporal receptive fields in auditory neurophysiology, and convolutional neural networks. In particular, convolutional time-frequency operators enabling the construction of timbral descriptors spanning temporal scales and robust to local time transformations.
In: Chimeras: Inventory of synthetic cognition, Onassis Foundation, 2022.
**Hecker, Mackay, „Synthetic Listening“, in Spectres III / Ghosts in Machine, Shelter Press, 2021.
Florian Hecker
TEMPLEXTURES
09.06.2022 – 29.07.2022