Emptiness,Hissing and Control On Ulf Langheinrich’s Oeuvre


'Marc Ries Marc Ries

In the works of Ulf Langheinrich, contexts, social settings, gestures and meanings are of no interest. The external features have been removed from the apparatuses with which images and sounds are produced. These works are media, but without a concrete mission—nothing is visualized, nothing set to music. Interest is focused on the materiality of the media, on its physics. Questions eliciting information about their consistency become important, about the hissing and the emptiness. How is it possible to successfully organize consistencies and changes in consistency on a temporal level? Every medium has at its disposal material that defines an overall cohesiveness, that which makes it thick, tight, solid, tough. The work on this material consistency—its animation, so to speak—reveals intensities that distinguish themselves from the use that one would commonly suppose.

Any sort of artistic work with media must be conceived with advantage in mind, must be familiar with the current technical state-of-the-art of the apparatuses, must learn to deal with the new symbolic interfaces. It is only working in a medium that makes it possible to work with a medium. In order to understand and design the specific aesthetic materiality that an apparatus-environment can produce, it is important to decide to work very closely along the essential contours of the medium, to follow not so much concepts as experiences and intuition. Every act of intervention must conform to the demands imposed by the inescapability and, at the same time, the instrumental nature of the materiality of the respective medium. 25 frames/second doesn’t equal 80 frames/second. Design segues from a body of technical knowledge to exact “investigations” that are not interested in the planned external applications but rather first and foremost in something akin to “internal richness of imagery.”

“For 500 years, the images have been full to bursting point; the entire universe forces one inside of them.” (Sartre) The artistic mode of dealing with the materiality of media may be able to escape the images and sounds of the over-semantification that they suffer in the way they are used on an everyday basis. The torturous sensory overload that surrounds us, the compulsion to recognize everything possible in images or to want to communicate something by means of them—all of these are things to strive to avoid. Pure white. Pure black. Hissing. Emptiness. Nothing. Objective is less of an abstraction than Auflösung (dissolution/resolution).

Abstraction may indeed be capable of continually transforming things and figures into formal values, but the aim is their resurrection as abstract gestures in an abstract space. Auflösung, on the other hand, reflects upon that which remains after everything that can be recognized and named has been withdrawn and erased. Auflösung is not so much a matter of transformation as it is a matter of processes of disintegration, of fragmentation and elimination of signification, of parameter reduction, of bringing about disappearance. High Auflösung prevails here in a double sense: more pixels and fewer parameters. What is to be seen are, for example, surfaces, stripes, vibrations—primary visual and tonal material. Sound is deployed as a model. Even if there is none, the image resounds because it is conceived as a sound. It is endowed with that attribute that imparts to these works what is perhaps their most intensely manifested experience: their hissing. But can one experience hissing, which is to say understand it? There is the bright white noise that dissolves significance and is recognizable on the visual level as white or gray surfaces. From the point of view of information theory, this hissing is understood as a hindrance, as a disturbance to the transmission of information; from an aesthetic perspective, though, this disruption is constitutive for the will to assume a form. On the other hand, there is what could be called a rather black noise. Here, the hissing is perceived as a droning, as dark material, thick consistencies, heaviness, a previously filtered hissing with fissured frequency responses. A video image is unsuited to this complex, “picturesque” hissing; it calls for a high-resolution image, one with a high degree of visual compression and density. Only then does it become possible “to have quite a bit to say” within this hissing—thus, to no longer utilize the hissing as a “creative” disturbance alone but rather as designable material, mass, materiality. The modulating of this tonal mass takes place on a high level of arranged intensities on which minimal things are treated, the most minute changes occur, and perhaps micro-stories are even played out.

As the hissing pours out, the emptiness escapes—emptiness, for one thing, as complete, radical elimination of signification. This comes about when everything that has to do with the construct of the ego has been deactivated, eliminated. The hissing is also to a certain extent aggressive or at least extremely insistent, something that overlays, conceals and subverts the original ego-gestures and nevertheless contains them so that they are no longer visible and yet still dissolved within it. The only order that is present is that of a superordinated architecture, a sort of meta-guideline, though one without intentionality. Otherwise, there are only the unchanging oscillations, what might be called a crystalline order. The other emptiness is that of a new mixed set of circumstances whereby the consistencies of the material employed are diluted to such an extent that they appear to be empty, totally white or totally black. And the hissing is gone; what remains is absolutely nothing, a completely static tone cluster, without animation, without drifting or modulation. Thus, when that which has been experienced becomes so thin, so blurred and fragile that it can no longer be located spatially-which still by no means implies that nothing at all exists-there are still the tones.

And it is still possible to modify amplitudes of light and sound fields; one can still depict something on the temporal level, which means that the emptiness exists too. It is a visual-auditory experience that now becomes a material-aesthetic part of the other existence, the exterior world. The emptiness, which is to be equated with the hissing, is not negation or non-information; instead, it is the setting of a circumstance, a third specificity-that is, of a particular, of an actual, of a decisively different approach to the world.
“The most essential influence upon the modern work of art has been the unification of the actual with the ephemeral” (Habermas). The present clings as a conditio sine qua non to work with media, with technically generated images and sounds, the “fleeting transient beauty of contemporary life” (Baudelaire), whereby this beauty is for the most part attributable to the materiality of the images, the color, the forms upon the panel painting, the vibrations, the fleetingness and rapidity, the atomization and the diversity in the electronic image.

At the same time, this aesthetic intervention in this material is capable of bringing out eternal, unalterable, indeed even transcendent values. The hissing that flows out of the emptiness is resounding, flickering nothingness.
For one thing, this “program” needs omnipresent control. A great deal has to be excluded in order for “something” to breathe, in order for a bit of individual authenticity to become possible. Arbitrariness and happenstance are absolutely out of the question; accordingly, the maximum possible planability, predictability, controllability are the outcomes of objectives that cannot be called into question. Moreover, and as a consequence of this absolute will to achieve control, this program awaits a specific spatial specification for its implementation. That of the white or black cube.

And that of the installation. Even the locations of the first moving picture demanded an installation, a particular spatial order appropriate to the perception of it. Movie theater interiors regulate the relationship between the picture and the viewer in an extremely precise way. The grand emptiness, the white surface on the wall can even be described as object-like; the projection of even the simplest matters of everyday life occurs under circumstances that completely exclude precisely this everyday life. What is required is a self-contained space that is completely homogeneous, consistent, and sterilized of all syntax, one in which the work can be consummately staged. Or better yet: precisely that is the work. This means that the size and the ubiquity of the projections create a spatial order, a spatial plasticity of sound, image and viewer that furthers the indistinguishability of the work, the space and the audience. Yes indeed: this audience itself is “penetrated” for the purpose of its own self-dissolution or, actually, in order to enable it enter into a “sub-medial space” (Groys).

DRIFT—live version
In this audiovisual performance, elements of image and sound collide, coalesce and disintegrate at the finest possible resolution. The repetition and expansion of all acoustic and visual impressions gives rise to a hypnotic fascination.
Compositing assistance: Wolfgang Schwarzenbrunner and Tanja Tomic
Real Time playback system: Dirk Langheinrich
DRIFT is commissioned and produced by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image / Melbourne,
Curator Mike Stubbs and the Muffatwerk / Munich, curator Dietmar Lupfer.
Supported by Werkstaetten, Kulturhaus Wien and Austrian Federal Chancellery / Department for the Arts.
Special thanks to Richard Castelli & Sarah Ford, Martin Fritz


Waveform B—Installation
Two exhibition spaces are constructed and outfitted symmetrically, but projections and stroboscopic effects within them confront visitors to each with radically different spatial impressions that, due to flickering and vibration, are also constantly changing. In the artist’s words, the space is in “constant oscillation.”
PD environment by Wolfgang Schwarzenbrunner. Sound environment in cooperation with Rudolf Schauer, Klangplan/Wien. Special thanks to Johanna Rieseneder Personal thanks to Kurt Hentschläger / GRANULAR SYNTHESIS.
The Installation was realized with support of the Siemens Artist in Residence project at Ars Electronica.


Ulf Langheinrich—Artist Lecture
Ulf Langheinrich elaborates on the technical background, aesthetic approaches and artistic intentions of his projects, whereby he concentrates particularly on the works being presented during Ars Electronica 2005.