• eine Sound-Installation im öffentlichen Raum Konzept: Annabel Lange

The course of the installation

1. The Cage of Britney I As a bastard of perception the visitor confronts the installation which is stituated onto some urban waste land. One has to cross rough territory to get there. After a short time of transit the visitor attains some sort of building pit, showing a small one-room apartment on a scale of 1:1. One could call it a habitation-pit, a “Wohngrube ” because looking from above a wide selection of houshold machines becomes recognisable: i.e. telephone, TV, mixer, hair dryer, microwave, ventilator, electric toothbrush etc. . Every machine is turned on and runs in its own rythm. Evening falls, from far the visitors can hear the muffled sounds of the streets and shops. A strong floodlighte lights the scenery while it is getting darker,defamiliarizing this depiction of everyday-life. Not far away one musician (-more than one is possible, too, of course-) has taken place who is eavesdropping on this habitation-pit. The souds of all the running machines are recorded and become arranged, orchestated, then transmitted to several boxes that stand in a circle around the scene. The musician is situated a bit apart, working hidden in a fake transporter, where all the “spying equipment” is put. As if exploring and scrutinising this site step by step two meters below the ground the material is interpreted. This staged site portraits the sphere of a singular person, abstracted by a personal park of machinery. There the audience listens and observes from above, standing excluded in front of this detached microcosm.

2. Obliteration
   While the visitors see themselves put in a distant position to this process, being able to keep the focus and overview the event, the pit, including all its running electric devices will slowly be filled up with the excavated earth around it. An annulment of this self-contained cosmos gets going. The portrayal of a civilised cage on which the audience could meditate on is removed. Thus the acoustic perception of the picture becomes abolished as well until silence is re-established.

3. The cage of Britney II If the visitor have been given the possibilty of an overview, next he/she finds him/herself in a quite different scenery of perception. Now they are the “prisoners” and the scenery changes immediately. Well-known mainstream music, decoration (inevitable disco-ball, bar etc.) and light describing a typical party set-up transform the scene. The dance floor is set on the actual area of the building-pit.

Now, in that state of united consumption, reduced to one of the simplest collective state and not anymore pinned down in solitary contemplation, a disciplined and disciplinary panorama ist established. As if with some sort of anticipatory obedience the first part is ended and forestalling the latent boredom and possible incomprehensibility the audience is invited to no longer stare around but to take over and strike a pose. This attitude doesn`t correspond to an overview and potential censorship, but dispersion and dissolution in an open field of an “installation”. Still the past lies quietly underneath everybody´s feet. The collective participation is installed on something that -as narrative and basis of the ongoing activity- can be conjured anytime during that artificial party. How clearly and how often the memory will be recalled is the experiment and stays the personal experience of each visitor. As a bastard-like being one is free to back-pedal in reflection any given moment.

Some imagined backround

“Des weiteren führt der vorauseilende Gehorsam dazu, dass die handelnde Person sich selbst die Illusion bewahre kann freiwillig zu handeln.Auf diese Weise wird die demütigende Erfahrung vermieden,zu etwas gezwungen zu werden. Da die Erfahrung der eigenen Ohnmacht auf Dauer unerträglich ist, suggeriert sich die handelte Person aus eigenem Antrieb zu handeln.“ (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam (abgerufen am 21.Juli 2007))

1. The bastard

The installation aims at the activation and encirclement of the senses formed by contemporary media. Surely the visitor, concerning the senses, can always be acclaimed to be of a bastard nature, since next to hearing and vision, the tactile, olfactory, the equilibrium sense and also the sense of taste play a role, even if they are here of secondary importance. But even if hearing and vision are focused on in that installation, it is not a comparison of those two faculties that tries to discern what makes us a hybrid.(Neither is it the main focus on different “contents” within one faculty, e.g. the comparison of popular music and manipulation of sounds in music.) Moreover the installation sees the visitor as a bastard by dividing oneslf up in different ways of dispersing the conscience. Those ways are closely intertwined with differing positions of perception. The contemplative visitor standing aloof are to watch as if it was a stage and concentates on it looking downwards, wheras later, one is integrated in the event in ways that make one loose the distance. One`s self-perception as being a objective observer is demolished. The audience experiences itself as being erratic between contemplation and taking advatage of the given scenery, caught between the hold of inner evocations and outer action. A bearer of two alien parents: singularity in reflection vs. collective expenditure and digression.

Anticipatory obedience is her the key word for both force and powerlessness of such an installation, as the first part yields to oblivion and in a sort of overraction fullfills the presumed desires of the audience, it becomes a burlesque, ridiculous and supeior at the same time. It matches and enforces the bastard but not to its own best, for its history is at the mercy of the users` will and capacity for remebering.

1. Some context and wordplay

A pun. “Cage” also alludes to the sound and noise-compositions of John Cage. He himself an inheritor of bruitism, a para-movement of the futrists and constructivists where entire cities happened to be orchestrated, that is, their infrastructutal institutions e.g. all kinds of transportation, harbors and factories were arranged, as for example Arseni Awraamow did in 1922 in Baku/Russia. As a commentary taking its distance, contary to this, this installation is not dealing with the public and its acoustic material as rumbling street-cars, the buszzing of the pylons and the wail of a siren. The „Britney Cage” first of all, doesnt draw the attention to an esthetic overall context of the sourroundings like the arrangements of the modern ancestors tried to do but just to this habitation pit. At the same time it confronts the visitor formally and critically with her/his own limits and with cage-like perception. Within the pit everything is depicting a singular being and aiming at the spectators as being likewise.Different from the modelled city, the visitor is able do judge and overview the set-up. The installation does not intend to get in contact with the real conditions that it comes across by analysing and resuming its forms. It is not site-specific, but artificial implant. The conection to the public space, the neighbourhood etc. is not relevant in the first part. “Britney” denotes in the second part the collective integration that pop has the ability to ignite and for which Mrs. spears stands synonymously. She is just a titular example for the force field of a party crowd. Now there the public defintely plays a major role, but is not giving an alternative at hand to the seperating reflection and is also characterised by the restriction of perception. Of course activity and dissolution is opposite an inner stream of reflection but it is not forcedly a broadened experience but -as vulgarization- simple escapism.

Following Henri Bergson, the course of the installation resumes a transit from “mémoire souvenir” ( a réverie of the bastards, passivly connected with personal memories and reflections) over to “ mémoire habitude” during which the visitor is taken by the hand by the capability of memory by falling into known practices. Habits freeze the always changing and pliable course of the mind into pattern and pop is marked by a schematic repertoire of patterns wher Britney Spears functions as a figure head among others. The bastard might follow her actively but then as schematically active. It is absolutely possible to be competent and sovereign in that cage and during the activation of a known scheme the reptition is not to be underestimated when it comes to get into contact with the public a Der Bastard folgt ihr aktiv aber schematisch aktiv. Within the cage of Britney II the public has an important role, but a role whose impact has to be left to each one´s interpretation in this site itself, every description is sheer speculation and it is not the intention to vote for either mémoire souvenir or mémoire habitude or something like this .