Soon at the SCHIRN: In a Silent Way

How can the measurement of time become a spatial experience? Katja Mater transforms the grounds of the SCHIRN’s interim site in Bockenheim into a sundial. The Latin title HIC. EST. TUUM. HORA. translates into English as “This is your hour,” and addresses every person who experiences the work in action. The subheading 50° 07′ 16″ N 08° 39′ 12″ E refers to the clock’s geographic coordinates.

Conventional sundials consist of a flat surface, a scale, and a so-called gnomon, a protruding part that casts a shadow. As the Earth rotates, the sun appears to move across the sky, leading the gnomon’s shadow to fall on different markings on the scale, which allows us to read the time. Mater’s sundial for the SCHIRN features four hour markers distributed across the site. The sundial is readable from April through September, depending on the changing position of the sun.

The artist incorporates existing elements and structures such as the ground’s chimney, whose shadow falls on the building facade at 10 a.m. Depending on the month, the shadow falls on three different floors, each marked with the number 10: in June/July on the first floor, in May/August on the second, and in April/September on the third. Mater also makes use of existing numbers such as the building number 3 on Gabriel-Riesser-Weg, and the “2” on the sign for HALLE 2. In addition, the building number 13 on Zeppelin-Allee is added. Various shadow casters or reflections highlight the numbers at specific times, activating the work.

Margaret Raspé sought to make slow, hidden processes and automated sequences visible through her art. Suspended between branches, her “rain drums” transform falling precipitation into delicate, aleatoric soundtracks. The organic shapes of the drums, made of fabric primed with beeswax, amplify the sound of rain to stage a fleeting, non-invasive collaboration with nature.
Throughout her practice, Raspé strove to have a symbiotic relationship with the environment. In terms of both content and form, her artistic work was shaped by sustainability and local forms of production—at a time when ecological issues were only just beginning to enter public awareness.

Bernhard Schreiner’s work explores sound as a temporal process that makes the world tangible. He sees sound as a connection between two types of reality: one that is external and physical, and one that is internal and neural. From an early age, he made field recordings of external, audible objects. Schreiner is less interested in their authentic reproduction than in using sounds to imitate an acoustic world in which things and non-things commingle and, through constant tonal modulation, introduce a sense of continuity into this world.

For “In A Silent Way,” Bernhard Schreiner has developed a synthesizer whose sounds are generated and influenced by the interaction of the surrounding plants with the weather. Rain, sun, and even cool temperatures become transient producers of a real-time soundscape. In Schreiner’s installation, these external sound sources operate in interplay with the synthesizer’s internal modules. One module activates, for example, when the voltage in a plant increases as it absorbs water, translating the impulse of this heightened voltage into a sound that repeats until a new change is detected in the plant. By sampling such signals and translating them into sounds, an autonomous and infinite composition emerges: an analog-digital piece of music that undergoes continual transformation over an unending period of time.