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Transmediale.07 Jan-Peter Sonntag - Borders and the Infinite
Saturday, 03 February, 2007 - 21:42
Jan-Peter E. R. Sonntag's presentation, Borders and the Infinite, was unusual in that he sat, mostly motionless on stage, and did not speak until the end of the session. Sonntag is an artist and composer, whose recent work concentrates on electricity research, video, installations and performance, but his presentation was profoundly about the sound as a form, phenomenon and 'fluid' medium.
His presentation began with a prerecorded female voice reading, we assume, Sonntag's own words, acknowledging that those words, written one month before, served to draw attention to the gaps in space and time that media open up and close down. Interstices remained a constant theme in a presentation which touched on the relation of sound to the body, Einsteinian relativity (again), and misapprehensions of Walter Benjamin and the Aura, and an acknowledgement of John Cage's attention to the musical pause.
Sonntag's sat for 55 minutes during his presentation, isolated on the panel, occasionally showing his enjoyment of the malaprops his voice artists committed, and which he evidently left in as a pleasure of the nature of human sound and breath, rather than deliver a sanitised production. Significantly his presentation argued that art need have no purpose - has no purpose - can be meant not to mean. An interesting performance.
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