serge baghdassarians: there was a time when just about all self-respecting artists talked about the second thermodynamic law. entropy was the buzzword of the day, even though few actually knew much about it. Others flirted with metaphysics all their lives, for example, simone weil’s use of gravity as a metaphor in her christian interpretations. i use the laws of physics to place cheap, mass-produced objects into a "state of emergency" in my work. whether it’s gravity, tension, air pressure or whatever, the determining factor isn’t which law of nature I use but the choice of materials.

generally the object has to be useful. however, in my work, objects become eccentric. by that i mean i make them deviate from their actual function to temporarily define a spectrum of possibilities or, more precisely, outcomes. for example, a foot pump. everyone knows the exertive pleasure of pumping up a paddleboat in searing heat or an air mattress while half-asleep. in downbeat, however, the foot pump is pressed together instead of trodden on and "conserved" with adhesive tape until this state is abruptly terminated by the pressure of the steel springs inside the bellows. it’s also interesting to note how differently mass-produced objects behave under the same conditions. in the installation, the time point of "de-compression", that is, when the tape tears, varies between 10 minutes and many hours. that’s one reason for why I work in series.

you’re probably alluding the off-the-cuff remark i made last time we met, that downbeat was my first sm work. well, in that work i seal the foot pump’s air inlet with rubber ball. i wanted to slow down the process of decompression, stretch it out, to see the bellows expand in slow motion. the rubber ball may seem like a ball-gag, however, my first priority is always to work with a material’s or object’s inherent characteristics. for instance, the foot pump is a potential power source. in the moment of decompression built-up energy is released. the polystyrene hemispheres attached to the sides increase the resulting friction and generate two superposed pulse strings. the result is an interplay of forces and materials. that’s enough for me. however, the objects i use are all so loaded that it doesn’t matter how abstract, geometric or stylized the assembly i use is. so the fact that my work can inspire extremely diverging associations doesn’t really surprise me. the spontaneous response of the israeli composer dror feiler to tertium comparationis, an installation using pvc rulers and rubber bands, was that they were all "suicide bombers". or, an audience member, whose name unfortunately escapes me, associated aerobic exercise, which uses air balloons, droppers and rubber bands, with a junkie discarding their tourniquet after a shot. they’re good examples of how people can’t help but constantly generate images. however, in the final instance, they’re just interpretations. Via extremely simple, irreducible means, i try to provide the viewer with as direct an access to the work as possible, which causes past experience and the present perception to merge.

apart from mixing and mastering recordings, i’ve never used a computer for either my electronic music excursions or my installations. during a tour of the usa with my long-term collaborative partner boris baltschun, we were surprised by the sub-standard power supply in some places, especially california. until that point i had concentrated on music using loud speakers. but from then on i started to enjoy developing installations that bore some relation to electronic music but didn’t rely on electricity – unplugged. the first such work, called brownout and formed from air balloons and disposable syringes, was the result of a collaboration with boris at the beginning of 2005. in the meantime the sound aspect has become one of many, it’s not as prominent anymore. that’s why i avoid using the term 'sound art'.

because i mostly don’t use electricity, my installations have a limited time span. usually they only last a few hours, more infrequently a few days. for instance, building the installation kritische masse takes longer than the actual "show". work and latency are the key terms here. i work to set a process in motion. however, the work doesn’t become manifest in a product, but instead dissipates over a period of time like air from a balloon. it’s extremely economically inefficient, particularly because photos can’t replicate the action either, they simply document it. while the preparatory measures required to create the installation remain hidden from the audience, the consequences reveal themselves by means of the objects' – sometimes considerably delayed – visual and audible reactions. in downbeat the latency is so extended that the consequences cause the initial actions to be almost forgotten, or that is, cast me, like the audience, as spectators of an interplay of material, time and energy.
but to return to the question of economics, there’s an absurd story about this in relation to kritische masse. a few months ago i tried to buy a large number of table-tennis balls. not really a big deal, except that i couldn’t find any in my neighborhood. i thought to myself, ok, the outdoor season is over, i have to approach this more systematically, and i finally did manage to get hold of the balls. except then it turned out that the balls had a diameter of 4 cm instead of the 3.8 cm of the balls i had bought a few months earlier. so i looked into this and came across the following story. in 2000, the international table-tennis federation had decided to increase the diameter of table-tennis balls by 2 mm to make the sport more viable for television. the idea was that the rallies would be slower and longer and therefore more enjoyable for viewers at home. only, since then, coatings that increase speed, have also kept being developed and released on the market, such that the desired effect was never achieved. isn’t that great? i can only say: take up playing the game yourself, instead of just sitting in front of the tv, and to the game officials, why not try balloons …

acousticians speak of an echo when a soundwave’s reflection is so delayed that it’s heard as a separate sound. cliffs are an example of a perfect reflective surface in nature. in tape delay there’s neither an incoming signal nor a reflective wall or a tape delay machine. instead, rolls of masking tape unfurl themselves to continually kick off a simple mechanism – the pulling apart and pushing together of bellows extracted from "moo" noisemakers. once on the ground, the closely adjacent strips form one surface but there’s no sound anymore. during a test run, i thought of a passage from alphaville, in the sense in which lemmy caution says to alpha 60: "the past represents its future. it advances in a straight line, yet it ends by coming full circle." he could have been talking about my work. in any case, i have a small anecdote about this, too. while preparing for this festival i tried to determine the "tape speed" required for the masking tape to travel the 6.8 meters from ceiling to floor within three days. one of my favorite topics: viscosity. the more masking tape on the roll, the more quickly it unfurls. that’s probably because the glue adheres better on the inner lanes than the outer ones, while the reduction in weight is marginal. the distance per revolution decreases by about 1 mm with each turn. by measuring the tape, i found out that a roll has 56 revolutions of approximately 28 cm each, which equals 15.68 m masking tape. but the package label promises 20 m. luckily haus der kulturen doesn’t have 20 m high ceilings. it doesn’t bear thinking about! once the festival is over i’m going to go to the store and call their attention to this. i’m already looking forward to their reaction. however, no other masking tape unwinds as well as this one …

good question. my only answer at this time is, give me the money and you’ll find out after the fact; i’ve got quite a few ideas queued up.