Rückspiegel
1-Rueckspiegel_Ulm-3
Rückspiegel, 2008
5-channel video installation, 77 min
Michaela Melián spoke with Alexander Kluge, Edgar Reitz, Josef Anton Riedl, Hans-Jörg Wicha, and Kurd Alsleben about the multimedia work VariaVision—Unendliche Fahrt, the Studio for Electronic Music, and the Ulm School of Design. The transcribed interviews are read by the actors Peter Brombacher, René Dumont, Hans Kremer, Stefan Merki, Steven Scharf of the Münchner Kammerspiele.
Alexander Kluge, author and filmmaker, lawyer—spoken by Stefan Merki
The studio is an alchemist’s kitchen of sounds. But at a high scientific and technical level. Sounds are thought up and produced here with the aid of science. This was precisely the spirit of the Ulm School of Design.
In a sense you can compose in it in a completely new way. Think of the word organ, and a pretty big machine, too, here it has been universalized. There’s nothing silky about any of the music produced, it even has a sort of refractory tendency.
But around 1968 opposition was central. Students, visitors or whoever, coming to Ulm from Frankfurt asked what’s all this hooey, Vietnam’s important, social issues, and you fool around with tubes in a studio. Adorno died in 1969. He, of course, would have been with us all the way.
The fact that expressivity has political content, that the lore of such content, its production, and work on expressive contents is actually a central issue, a political matter—they didn’t believe us.
Edgar Reitz, film director and author—spoken by Hans Kremer
I was always looking for a utopian cinema and wondering how we could get away from being tied down to cinema’s specific place and fixed starting times, and then I thought precisely at exhibitions or places where people are out of the daily rut and moving around receptively one could develop a new kind of cinema consisting in images that follow the flow of people. We went on to call it cinema for people in motion. And that was the idea, people move, and we don’t want to hold them up or detain them while we tell a story, we want to tell them our stories in motion.
Josef Anton Riedl, composer, sound artist, electronics pioneer, sound poet—spoken by Peter Brombacher
There was no vocoder in Cologne at the time, it was in Munich. It was developed from American technology, but very, very independently. A voice is first analyzed and, on the basis of the analysis, generators are made to produce the sound of the voice by recreating the voiced and unvoiced sounds.
I wanted to discover, invent, new noises and sounds, and develop everything as it were from the basic substance and not take—appropriate—noises from nature. The studio makes it theoretically possible to recreate every sound, every tone that exists in the world.
I wanted to create sounds that had never been heard before and compose autonomous music. That was the philosophy, the aesthetic.
Hansjörg Wicha, electronics and sound engineer—spoken by René Dumont
One morning someone from Warner Brothers turned up in the studio, laid a case full of dollar bills on the table, and said, “I have two or three days’ time, I want to buy sounds, now let me hear what you have to offer.” For two or three days I produced sounds for them, nothing else, from morning to evening nothing but sounds, all kinds of sounds, and you still come across them today here and there. The guy from Warner Brothers took the sounds away on tape and used them in Hollywood in different productions. I still keep hearing them when an American movie is playing somewhere. Ah, there’s a sound in there, one of the ones we produced back then.
Kurd Alsleben, artist and theoretician—spoken by Steven Scharf
IIf one counts Ulm as an art college, then it was the only art college at the time teaching cybernetics. That, in my opinion, went back to Tomás Maldonado, who pursued the idea that design must keep abreast of scientific thought and that the designer, the product designer, plays an important role in industry. In science-based society of that time the belief was widespread that science brought people improvements. Ulm at any rate stood for the idea of improving society via aesthetic education and design. And, fundamentally, it is really possible since the shaping of common sense in society has a strong aesthetic component.