Florian Hecker | Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese

Florian Hecker

Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese

Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press, 2019

384 pp., 24 × 32 cm, softcover

Edition size unknown

Available from the publisher, here. 

"TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-SEVEN PAGES, column after column of digits so tiny and so densely packed that, even with my reading glasses on, I have to use a magnifying glass. Three sets of numbers in each column, eleven columns on each page. This is the principal part of Florian Hecker: Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese, the catalogue produced in the aftermath of sound artist Florian Hecker’s 2017 exhibition at Vienna’s Kunsthalle Wien. Leafing through the volume, I am lost in what feels like an endless, undulating expanse of ciphers I cannot possibly hope to make sense of, abstractions more brutal than most conceptions of modern art could ever have prepared me for.

Yet while numbers as such are abstract, numbers relating to concrete things are not: They are part of the world of actual phenomena. And the endless columns of numerals are exactly that. They express the values and measures of “timbre”—an elusive quality of auditory texture whose significance is largely founded on the fact that, unlike “pitch” or “harmony,” it cannot be exactly described. Timbre could be the overtones you hear as a sound lingers. It could be the warmth of a particular violin or the sudden shrill edge of an angry voice. There are so many ways of hitting a high C—and timbre is, essentially, what differentiates them. No wonder that a modern age focused on scientifically capturing, calculating, and reproducing even the most fleeting sensations would become fixated on it. In modern music, composers such as Wagner and Debussy were obsessed with timbre, attempting to foreground and celebrate its complexities in their compositions. Others endeavored to synthetically produce it: In the field of electroacoustic and electronic music, composers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Iannis Xenakis sought to both modulate and replicate preexisting sound textures—and create new ones from scratch. But taking seriously the very elusiveness of timbre—that it is essentially a hybrid signature of a concatenation of events including not just the vagaries of the sound source but also the ear and brain of the individual listener—how do you actually produce it?"

- Ina Blom, Artforum