_Peter Vogel The Sound Of Shadows
Wergo DVD
_by Philip Clark
The Wire, Feb 2012, p. 78
There’s a ‘wall of silence’ surrounding the work of pioneering Freiburg based sound artist Peter Vogel, I nearly wrote, which, considering Vogel’s interactive artworks reverberate against the walls of art galleries – transforming what look like inanimate objects into resonating chambers – would have been a
spectacularly ill-judged choice of words.
But for a figure of Vogel’s influence and status, there is a surprising scarcity of material in the public domain, a wrong this documentary by Brighton University’s Jean Martin and Conall Gleeson aims to put right. The film was released late last year to accompany the first UK exhibition of Vogel’s work in
Brighton, and really does make you wish you had been there. Vogel is a persuasive advocate, his beacon-bright, wired eyes looking like they’ve been illuminated by electronic gadgets too.
As he discusses how his training as a physicist, and subsequent day jobs designing medical equipment and cybernetic models, coexisted with his work as a painter, his true artistic credo strides into view. Perched in front of an early 1970s canvas called Feuertanz (Fire Dance), he explains how he hoped people would interpret his repetitive structures as three-dimensional dance patterns. “But they saw landscape,” he says.
When Vogel moves his hands across one of his ‘sound wall’ installations, Techno Sound Wall (1996), a six-metre construction made from strips of metal wire, circuits, sensors, tiny loudspeakers, et al, that third
dimension – time – makes its presence felt at last. From a distance the piece resembles an exploded diagram of a music stave; but a counterpoint between the visual and the aural is at play. Originally designed so Techno beats would be generated as people danced in front of it – their shadows tempting embedded sensors to react – pieces like Lichtobjekt (Light Object) also deal up the paradox that these rigid, geometrically engineered structures compose sounds that cannot be fully controlled.
And the point seems clear enough – approaching a Vogel work because it looks visually inviting unwittingly changes relationships to it by triggering sound, which makes viewers look closer at the mechanisms creating the sounds, which creates more sound. If Vogel’s third dimension was time, there’s the fourth dimension: the unknowable madness of crowds.
The Wire, Feb 2012, p. 78
There’s a ‘wall of silence’ surrounding the work of pioneering Freiburg based sound artist Peter Vogel, I nearly wrote, which, considering Vogel’s interactive artworks reverberate against the walls of art galleries – transforming what look like inanimate objects into resonating chambers – would have been a
spectacularly ill-judged choice of words.
But for a figure of Vogel’s influence and status, there is a surprising scarcity of material in the public domain, a wrong this documentary by Brighton University’s Jean Martin and Conall Gleeson aims to put right. The film was released late last year to accompany the first UK exhibition of Vogel’s work in
Brighton, and really does make you wish you had been there. Vogel is a persuasive advocate, his beacon-bright, wired eyes looking like they’ve been illuminated by electronic gadgets too.
As he discusses how his training as a physicist, and subsequent day jobs designing medical equipment and cybernetic models, coexisted with his work as a painter, his true artistic credo strides into view. Perched in front of an early 1970s canvas called Feuertanz (Fire Dance), he explains how he hoped people would interpret his repetitive structures as three-dimensional dance patterns. “But they saw landscape,” he says.
When Vogel moves his hands across one of his ‘sound wall’ installations, Techno Sound Wall (1996), a six-metre construction made from strips of metal wire, circuits, sensors, tiny loudspeakers, et al, that third
dimension – time – makes its presence felt at last. From a distance the piece resembles an exploded diagram of a music stave; but a counterpoint between the visual and the aural is at play. Originally designed so Techno beats would be generated as people danced in front of it – their shadows tempting embedded sensors to react – pieces like Lichtobjekt (Light Object) also deal up the paradox that these rigid, geometrically engineered structures compose sounds that cannot be fully controlled.
And the point seems clear enough – approaching a Vogel work because it looks visually inviting unwittingly changes relationships to it by triggering sound, which makes viewers look closer at the mechanisms creating the sounds, which creates more sound. If Vogel’s third dimension was time, there’s the fourth dimension: the unknowable madness of crowds.