Since 2005 I have an ongoing collaboration with the artist Marianne Dekker. We started with little audiovisual experiments, in which Dekker’s short abstract animations were combined with excerpts from my electroacoustic compositions. There, the synchronicity of visual and sonic events was left entirely to chance.
The first collaboration on a larger scale was for Lustre (2009). This 20-minute piece consists roughly of two halves, of which the music of second half has a much lower density than the first half. Exactly at the transition from the first part to the second, the visual material joins in, thereby compensating for the decrease in density of the music. The idea behind it was to maintain the overall density of events, but now on two levels of perception instead of one. No attempts were made to synchronize sonic and visual events on a small time scale, but the structures of the visuals and the music now had some points of connection to emphasize their independence.
These aspects of ‘dialog’ between the sonic and the visual layers has been taken one step further in Sterne 14. The music varies from very dense to complete silence, while the visuals vary from infinitely detailed to completely monochromatic screens. The musical material for Sterne 14 was taken from my composition Sternflüstern ( 2003).
year: 2011–2012
duration: 13:55
tracks: 5.1 + video