CogNovo fellows and faculty, along with other Plymouth University students and staff, contributed a set of audio and musical responses to a recent exhibit of works by Gerard Richter, one of the most important German visual artists still living and a pioneer of the New European Painting movement. According to the "artist room newspaper" at the Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, where the exhibit is being held, "When we heard that we had been successful in bringing ARTIST ROOMS Gerhard Richter to Plymouth, we immediately started dreaming ideas of how to work with some really interesting people in Higher and Further Education in the city. We wanted to include students in the process o f exhibition and making; allowing their ideas and enthusiasm to filter through our curation of the ARTIST ROOMS collection, ad our engagement programme for children, young people and our exhibition visitors."
Two CogNovo research fellows contributed a piece and were chosen to be on the playlist:
Looking at Richter’s Spiegel, Grau [Mirror Painting (Grey)] was like peering into a portal, on the other side of which was a more sombre, more unstable version of reality. It provoked me towards a kind of nostalgia, a longing for an imagined or poorly-remembered past, and I immediately thought of Erik Satie's gymnopédies. They became the inspiration for this musical fragment.
Gerhard Richter's "Abstraktes Bild (Haut)" is based on Carsten Nicolai’s "milch", who experimented with patterns on the surface of milk caused by low frequency sound waves. I am simply trying to recreate the original pattern, which involves the preparation of a bowl of (hot) milk, the development of a sound oscillator in software, the placement of a speaker in the vicinity of the milk-filled bowl and some experimentation with the sound parameters, in particular with the volume and frequency of the oscillator. My attempt in trying to find the right parameters is recorded from a mono microphone for a period of 60 seconds, and the resulting audio file is level adjusted and faded at the end. Finally, the milk is repurposed for a muesli.
You can listen to the full play list on soundcloud.com: