TYMPANUM - Dance and Multimedia Improvisation

Christiane Conradt - Violoncello and Dance

Michaela Isabel Fünfhausen - Dance

Anthony Kelly & David Stalling – Visuals and sounds

Slavek Kwi - Sound Installations

Uwe Storch - Trumpet

Rory Walsh - Electronics and Processing

‘One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his sleep he had been transformed into an enormous bug.’

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

Reason and Science divide the world of our experience into discrete hierarchical pots. It was Schiller’s conviction that only art could restore the original unity of that experience. When we look at an ant struggling to find its way through falling raindrops, we immediately sympathise with its efforts. But our history of science tells us to think otherwise, that contrary to our intuitions the ant has no intentions, very little in common with us. Reconciling our intuitions with our evidence is equally difficult in the case of the computer: assemblages of tin cans and rubber, performing those tasks that we prize ourselves for, with unimaginably greater efficiency. How do we make our way between these various characters – some alien, some familiar – that populate our world?

This year’s Sounds Electric Festival uses computers and human performance, and draws on the sounds of the world of insects, to create a Tympanum: a membrane of communication between separated environments. Perhaps in these performances some of the natural unity out of which our distinctions between insects, computers, and humans arise, will be restored for us.

CC O Madagain, Toronto, 2005