The extended media art festival Binálé was held for the second time, now at the Merlin Theater in Budapest. As with the first edition of Binálé, the chief curator of the exhibition and series of events showcasing the works of numerous international artists is Viola Lukács, and one of the most complex works is by Kurt Hentschläger. We asked the artist about his striking installation on display at Binálé and the artistic, philosophical, and psychological questions that preoccupy him when creating his interrelated works.
— As far as I know, SUB (2019), which is currently on display at the Binálé, is the second piece in a trilogy of immersive works designed for dark spaces. The first piece in the trilogy was SOL (2017), followed by SUB; the final piece so far is EKO (2021). What led you from spectacular, immersive works (like ZEE or FEED.X), which used light, fog and strobe effects, to these dark pieces, which are essentially meant to be viewed head-on?
— At the time when I conceived ZEE, in 2008, and about five years into my stroboscopic fog / heightened experiences research, I intuitively concluded that the next new work would be staged in complete darkness. Almost as an opposite starting point to FEED and ZEE, where really an abundance of light, a kind of bathing in orgiastic light forms the core of the drama.
Much later, in 2015, in the runup finally to SOL, my first work in darkness, I was invited to Sonic Acts in Amsterdam where, at their programmatic symposium, I attended two back to back presentations, both spellbinding and perfectly fitting with what was on my mind.
The first talk was on Artificial Darkness, by Noam M Alcott, based on a (highly recommended) book he has first published it in 2013 (highly recommend), arguing that the history of modern art and media cannot be understood without considering the phenomenon of controlled darkness – beginning in the late 19th and early 20th century.
The second talk was about The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, by Paul Bogart, also a book (equally recommend). Already then, nine years ago, there were only two places left in the USA with untainted, non light polluted night sky, allowing for a full contrast view of the Milky Way.
This pair of modernist conditions — artificial darkness and artificial light — is still playing out. What makes it interesting for me are the psychological ramifications, like our fear of darkness, a complex trait influenced by a combination of genetics, evolutionary instincts, learned behaviors and personal experiences.
Total darkness, in itself a difficult condition to establish, does feel like a 360 void, it’s enveloping. When ever SUB’s hidden display in the dark comes to life, for ⅓ of a second, we are momentarily back to a head on “collision”. Which reveals the physical space itself and other fellow visitors, an impression overpowered usually by the visuals, erupting off the display. Once these micro moments of light pass, we are right back to darkness or rather to a ghostly field of after image auras floating and fading away, inhabiting our retinas. We see and not see at the same time. Afterimages are a splendid conundrum, a most delicate phenomena, I find it to be a truly poetic medium. There is a soothing quality also in drifting in afterimage infused darkness, it’s like a refuge of sorts, or so I like to think about it.
— Have you finished working in the dark? Or are there any aspects of darkness that you have yet to explore?
— I feel still scraping the surface of this medium, so yes, I will keep going. Incidentally, I am in production for dark chapter #4 right now. New work called FLUX, premieres in Riyadh this mid November.
On average I spend about a decade with a body of work. With SOL starting it 2017, there are a few more years left for sure. After all, it took me almost a decade to afford a large scale LED wall, in 2016, to finally start realizing work in darkness. A LED wall, unlike video projectors, would remain totally dark between visuals. In 2008 it was financially out of the question to even rent a display for more than days. Even in 2015 I still planned on building one myself — started on it actually — but luckily prices fell enough in those years and in 2016 finally, with help of two co-producers, I could afford to buy a display directly in Shenzhen. For what was “only” the price of a mid level new car… That same display still lives and is now installed in Budapest. It’s a good example of how long it sometimes takes between idea and realization.
— You have worked with the human head and body in your videos and digital art for years. Perhaps FELD (2000) marked a turning point towards complete abstraction. Could something in your creative process lead you back to figurative elements? If so, why? If not, why not?
— I see it as a back and forth, or in parallel. From pretty much 2003-2012 I worked on a generative, 3D physics driven human bodies body of work, called KARMA and CLUSTER, revisited 2022 as STROM. There is also PARADOX PARK, which is still only a trailer. A project in (slow) progress.
I consider the Human Form the “outside” where the world begins, and the Abstract as the “inside” where we feel. They are essentially intertwined.
— How does the size and form of a given space impact your work? In this case, how does SUB work in various spaces?
— Where to start. Space is everything. Indoors or outdoors. I studied architecture, for two years, before the academy, and today, as an artist, I feel the same passion for all things spatial. And that’s before sound is added. I see SUB and my other installations as hybrid spaces, the existing real space and what I temporarily design into it.
Each given space for a SUB installation is a challenge, acoustically, darkness wise, architecturally. SUB in Budapest is the polar opposite of SUB in Namur (Belgium) last year. Namur hosted SUB on the stage of a new theater. The space visible to visitors was a fraction of the entire theater and acoustically it sounded like a large hall space. People came in through a long, meandering hallway, before entering. In Budapest, on the contrary, SUB lives in a most compact space, with a short entering procedure through a small curtain area. Acoustically, both sites are day and night. Both versions though, for Namur and for Budapest, equally work. They are different prints / interpretations of an ephemerally inclined work and concept. This is possible only because I spend a week before the opening at each respective location, to create a custom fit of the work,
— How did the imagery for SUB come about? What determines the shapes and forms you use, such as ovals, circles and straight lines?
— The mostly minimal and abstract shapes appearing in SUB and the other darkness works, are designed to create specific compound after images. The time base of SUB is 60 frames per second, so 1/3 of a second means 20 frames of animation rendering a brief motion sequence. The retinal afterimage of this sequence will reflect all the displayed frames, more or less, depending on individual brightness and scale. Thus I am composing with motion as much as with shapes. Depending on the dimension of the forms appearing on screen the intensity of after images varies dramatically. Size and brightness does matter here, with after image duration growing exponentially. Light being such an essential prerequisite for live on this planet, the emotional impact of larger and brighter, more enveloping forms is pronounced. In that respect, I consider smaller, more “lightweight” airy forms, more cultured or civilized, something to look at with a sense of comfortable delight. The large filled out ovals or globes on the other hand live in another realm, they feel somewhat ancient, cultic if you will. They are overpowering and can elicit a primal response.
— In the visuals for SUB, you use a limited colour palette consisting of red, green and white. Why these colours? What determines the colour of a shape?
— True, colors are almost an exception in SUB. White, being the color containing the entire light spectrum, is most prevalent. This has to do with how afterimages form and their subsequent life span. Generally the more light energy the longer the after images will last. Thus, using color becomes more of a tool to define afterimage duration. Red for instance has the least light power, located at the end of the visible spectrum, where the human’s eye’s sensitivity is very low. Any forms / animations in red color will fade away quickly. I use this also to create sandwich moments, where say red and white elements appear together, but all red parts vanish swiftly and only the after images of the white parts remain for longer, becoming much more prominent.
— Sight is the most important sense, and SUB really puts it to the test, among other things. However, sound is also a very important element of your work’s mechanism. As with your other works, you designed the sound material for SUB yourself and synchronised it with the visuals. What is your relationship with sound, music and composition? When creating a new piece, do you start with the sound or the image?
— I think of sound as the totality of what is audible to the human ear and body. Sound includes ambient background noise, sounds found in nature, including the human voice, as well as music / composed patterns and the universe that is sound-synthesis, -manipulation & processing, sound effects etc. Not to forget infrasonic frequencies, that we hear with our entire body, through vibration.
The sound-scapes I compose therefore feature elements from across this spectrum. In SUB you’ll find generative, physical modeling gestures, processed voice samples, field recordings of cicadas and frogs, all woven together with rhythmical structures and spatialized sine wave fluctuations, plus infra rumbles. Two groups of sound layers work together, one unsynchronized to the visuals and present throughout during darkness, the other one reflecting and enhancing visual moments, including afterimage life spans (approximately so).
A main challenge in diffusing sound in SUB is to avoid counteracting the sublime nature of afterimages. I found things quickly become too dense, too loud, too distracting. All of which though depends on the scale of the host space.
As for whether I start with the sound or image, it’s more of a back and forth. No system I follow really. While I create time based work, my practice more relates to the process of painting than (narrative) film. This applies equally to image and sound-
— You were part of a creative duo called Granular=Synthesis with Ulf Langheinrich, which was active between 1992 and 2003. Why did the collaboration end? Since then, your artworks have become even more complex. Why do you choose to work alone?
— We worked together in what I remember as an intense frenzy, more so after we became successful. We toured around the world for what seemed an eternity and could barely keep up with opportunities. Eventually we burned out. Also, the internal competition of who was the better artist, at some point, became irritant. I think the work of Granular=Synthesis still holds up, and feel proud of what we accomplished. After we split, my intuition was to realize an idea I had in the back of my mind for a long time. So I started working with fog and stroboscopic light and made FEED. All work builds on the work that came before. In that sense FELD, NOISEGATE and POL, and the flicker aspect of these works, are essential to what came after, working again on my own. Why do I prefer to work alone? No negotiations 🙂
— Did the world of parties (technoculture) play a role in developing your art? If so, how?
— Generally, I value the culture of ephemeral, live events, concerts, performances & theatre, raves, all of it. Both for their hybrid, more experimentally inclined nature, as well as their communal, ritualistic potential.
The concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk / total work of art, combining art, architecture, performance and music is dear to my heart. In that sense techno culture marks a triumph of the Gesamtkunstwerk!
I had the “strobes in super dense fog” core idea for FEED and ZEE at a rave, in Brussels, in the mid 90’es. Which Ulf and I played in the early years of Granular Synthesis with then MODELL3, our first toured performance.
One thing I have abandoned is using extreme sound volume and sound pressure. Which creates intensity by itself but as a now standard is both predictable and damaging. I am half deaf, from what I did to my ears over the years, partially the reason for my belated reassessment, but mostly I find high dynamic range setups more versatile and interesting. One way to push back on hyper stimulation…
— Your installations impact both the senses and the psyche. What aspect of the 21st-century human psyche interests you most?
— To my understanding, throughout the history of human civilization, technological advances have changed human behaviors, habits, rituals and the human psyche in consequence. Like the invention of the mechanical clock, book print, television, the internet and social media did. I feel today, we (in the west) are at peak ADD, information overload, and hyper stimulation — in the sense of being tickled to death.
Digital technology, no news here, has radically informed and transformed our ways of communication, navigating, and expressing emotions. The most interesting aspect of getting way older, is to witness dramatic changes over decades, eventually over a life span. In the last 40 years I lived through the beginning of personal computing, the beginning of the www, beginning of online everything, digitally connecting everything, AI and so forth. Consequently, my life and sense of being in the world now is nothing like when I came off age.
A recurring feature of life in the 21st century is a sense of paradox, as in e.g. being hyperconnected yet feeling lonely. A smorgasbord of anxieties about the presence and future grows from these paradoxical conditions. I believe major changes are coming, one way or the other. Whether we like it or not.
— What are your thoughts on the current rate of technological development? How can the human psyche keep up with the pace and novelties of today?
— Ok, so here a dark outlook. My sense is that the human race is on a lemmings like trajectory. We are aware that we are destabilizing the planet’s climate (big time), are devouring earth’s limited resources as if there was no tomorrow and generally consume ourselves to death. None withstanding we keep partying, heads firmly in the sand. Truthfully, I see little room for optimism. As a species we have become too successful for our own good and are mired in hubris.
— As someone who creates complete worlds, how long do you think it will still be possible to dazzle overstimulated people? Will there come a time when nothing will be enough?
— Normally it should have ended already. We are no doubt addicted to overstimulation. And are stuck in a form of destructive tech trance, not the music, but the mental condition, next stop full out stupor… My artistic intentions in contrast are to creating authentic, resonant experiences, not unlike being immersed in glorious nature.