30 years future laboratory ZKM: Art in Motion

Galloping horses, rotating discs, buzzing film reels, rotating sound and computer-animated plants – motors of 20th century art are movement and acceleration.

BY REGINA HOCK

At the beginning of the 20th century, new picture machines developed from the wheel and clock technology that fired the industrial revolution: with the art of film, it was finally possible to look at time. Time could now be accelerated, stretched and stopped – with serious consequences for the perception of reality: appearance and reality overlapped.

Of motion and acceleration

In the exhibition »Art in Motion. 100 masterpieces with and through media« not only celluloid is set in motion, but also letters, light, sound – and even the viewer himself. Masterpieces of media art from 100 years can be seen at the ZKM. Media art is mainly shaped by stage art, action, Fluxus, poetry and music. That is why this exhibition is also an exhibition in the river. The masterpieces are flanked by works that open up new »causal connections« and enter into an exciting interplay with them.

After film and photography had succeeded in capturing visual events, the tape and record were used for acoustic events. From the development of technical musical instruments, new art forms emerged. The composer Hermann Scherchen designed a rotating loudspeaker ball in the 1950s. During sound reproduction, this so-called »Nullstrahler« rotates and radiates the sound evenly in all directions. Scherchen declared war on the »perfect place in the auditorium«, because the sound should be perceived from everywhere in the room with the same intensity. The sound source was no longer tied to a fixed location.

»Bucket receiver« 

Radio is also a time-based medium. While radio was still used during the First World War as an entertainment medium to distract the soldiers in the trenches, it fulfilled a truly life-saving task during the Second World War: prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp had hidden a receiver in a bucket of shoe grease that helped prepare the camp's self-liberation from the SS. With this receiver it was possible to receive the radio transmissions of the approaching American army. The curators of the exhibition »Art in Motion« have selected this recipient as a »masterpiece« – and that is only a discovery of some 500 media art works.

Speed of sound

In Gravesano (Ticino), Hermann Scherchen, the composer and inventor of the loudspeaker ball, also founded an experimental studio for electroacoustic music, which became a »hub« for artists. What the experimental studio in Gravesano was for the people living near the Alps was the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio for the Eastern Bloc countries. Sound engineers, composers and visual artists used the studio in Warsaw as a production site for their scores and sound collages for experimental and feature films. The exhibition »Through the Soundproof Curtain. The Polish Radio Experimental Studio« can also be seen at ZKM from July 14,  2018.