The evening with talks by Sadie Plant and Hans-Christian Dany as well as a performance concert by Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher will take place on the occasion of the current exhibition A Change in Weather (Broadcast Material 1989-2001) by Matthias Groebel. The lectures will be held in German and English.

Sadie Plant

In continuation of her essay Painted Faces in Matthias Groebel’s monograph “Painted Faces. Broadcast Material 1989-2006” (Edition Patrick Frey, 2022), Sadie Plant examines the lasting cultural, social, and psychological influences of analog television. Plant writes: “We have spent so much time watching TV. Now Groebel’s paintings prompt us to look at it again, and differently. How has television influenced the ways in which we see the world and think about ourselves? To what extent have its images shaped our dreams, desires, sensibilities? And how do these questions play out today, if TV is over? Or is there a sense in which it has only just begun?”

Sadie Plant (*1964 in Birmingham, UK) lives and works in Biel, CH. She has written and published widely on the interface of philosophy, technology and the arts, including Writing on Drugs (1999) and Zeros and Ones, Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1995). She is currently teaching on the Master’s program Contemporary Arts Practice at the Hochschule der Künste Bern.

Hans-Christian Dany

“What did it mean to step into the role of the engineer at the end of the eighties and build a painting machine?“ asks Hans-Christian Dany, and goes on: “Did this machine paint like a robot, instead of Matthias Groebel? Or did it rein human subjectivity? Groebel’s expression blurs with the machine, but also seems to permeate it atmospherically. Man and machine cross each other. In modern art, the vision of becoming an artistic subject through the machine goes back to the previous century. In the 1980s it was updated by hacker ethics with their rule: computers can create beauty and art. Are Groebel’s paintings so appealing today because computers have otherwise produced so little visual art? Or do these images perhaps even speak of a posthuman sovereignty that leaves room for technology in creating the image rather than subjugating it?”

Hans-Christian Dany (*1966) lives in Hamburg and writes in the morning. Sometimes these become books, such as Speed. Eine Gesellschaft auf Droge (2008), Morgen werde ich Idiot. Kybernetik und Kontrollgesellschaft (2013), Schneller als die Sonne. Aus dem Stillstand in eine unbekannte Zukunft (2015), or Ode to Routine (2020). He is currently working on a series of texts about his father, which will be published online by Mutter-Ey-Press. This spring, the book No Dandy, No Fun. Gutaussehend in den Untergang (2023) co-authored with curator Valérie Knoll, will be published.

Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher

In 1972, the German-American composer, cyberneticist and pioneer of electronic music Herbert Brün (1918–2000) published an essay entitled “For Anticommunication”. Here, Brün explores the relationship between information and music and in particular the ability of sounds and linguistic systems to communicate beyond semantic decipherability or meaning. Brün wrote: “Anticommunication is most easily observed, and often can have an almost entertaining quality, if well-known fragments of a linguistic system are composed into a contextual environment in which they try but fail to mean what they always had meant, and, instead, begin showing traces of integration into another linguistic system, in which, who knows, they might one day mean what they never meant before, and be communicative again.”
Jack Callahan & Jeff Witscher’s latest and ongoing work Futility 2023 refers to the eponymous piece Futility 1964 by Brün and brings together sound fragments that evoke the collective (American) acoustic unconscious of the 21st century: such as iPhone ringtones, Fortnite emotes, movie quotes from Napoleon Dynamite (2004), TikTok fragments, AOL instant messenger tones, YouTube ads, or sound templates from the Borat soundboard. At the moment of the Kunstverein’s performance, the sound library, compiled by Callahan and Witscher in hundreds of hours of research over the past five years, includes over 2000 categorized audio samples and continues to grow.

Jack Callahan (*1980) & Jeff Witscher (*1983) collaborative practice is rooted in a longtime exploration of noise, computer music, and new music. They release under various names, most recently under their music label FLEA. Works include ISSUES (What Happens on Earth Stays on Earth) (2022), Stockhausen Syndrome (2021), and The Past, Present And Future Of Experimental Music (Uncut GRM) (2020). Their collaborative work explores the limits of today’s music technology and the acoustic resemblances to radio broadcasts, group therapy sessions, and Q&A formats, among others, in order to question what music can be in a world where almost everything is reduced to signals and information.