Blank_White Noise
Year
Context
Blank is an experimental sculptural ensemble made up of five exhibits exploring different meanings of emptiness. Developed with Felix Weinold for Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus in Augsburg.
Approach
The sculpture »White Noise« has a record player reading an empty record. And yet one can hear that the sound is continuously changing due to dust and abrasion.
Consisting of six exhibits, »blank« is an experimental sculptural ensemble. The elements occupy the room according different interpretations of the theme:
Blank: shining – bright – purged – clean – empty space. These and other facets pose the impulse and framework of the project that is finally filled by the audience.
»blank« plays on the audience’s associative readiness and openness to concentrate on the barely perceptible, and to come away with their own sensory understanding. »blank« takes time, concentration and attention, yet it rewards one with ciphers, humor and pure eye candy. »blank« consists of a series of single modules that were created over a year for this project.
Even today, in the age of digital music files, some audiophiles still swear by the classic turntable for playing music. In the installation »White Noise«, the vinyl record is blank—meaning the groove was cut into the disc without any acoustic information.
Nevertheless, if you listen closely, you can perceive an impressive range of frequencies. Due to external influences such as dust, a mechanical aging process takes place over the course of the exhibition, producing a transformation of this acoustic nothingness. In this way, over time, nothingness turns into a complex "noise" sculpture.
The projection on the vaulted ceiling visualizes what is happening inside the groove: Standing in front of the record player, you see the preserved original state on the left—the record's very first playback. On the right is a real-time visualization of the current frequency spectrum on the record.