Florian Hecker: Synopsis

Synopsis, a new commission for Tramway, is one of Florian Hecker’s most ambitious installations to date. Both abstract and material, Hecker’s work is informed by the technical manipulation of sound; yet, in their realization as installation pieces they produce rich subjective sensory situations that evade categorization and linguistic description. With Synopsis, Hecker continues his explorations into the dramatization of digital sound, the listening process and the audience's auditory experience.

Four computer generated sound pieces build the core of Synopsis. Their display system comprises a suspended architecture of loudspeakers, cables and acoustic panels that differentiate four auditory environments, creating distinct but overlapping spatial layouts for the audience to experience.

Each piece presents a different, resynthesized version of an original sound piece. Played back simultaneously as one, overall, the spatial composition and the proximity of the four versions produces a maze of different resolutions, gradations, scales, similarities and differences; all meticulously synchronized, yet highly diverse in their material register.

The subject of the analysis of sound and the quantification of auditory sensation dates back to the beginnings of psychophysics, in the late 19th century, and has developed continually since. The pieces that make up Synopsis respond to this history by featuring contemporary models of analysis, abstraction, description and further resynthesis of algorithmically generated sound and an amalgamation of the same.

In this four-fold constellation, movement, attention and memory are key for encountering Synopsis, a site where the coherence of experience is breached; where objects can exist in multiple places at the same time, where events are smeared across space, where streams of experience diverge, coalesce, and fracture. A world where the conditions of object-hood are tested in a manner that is best qualified as hallucinatory.

Synopsis problematizes the notion of a whole or any one coherent or singular perception. Presenting us instead with a pluraphonic installation which embraces multiple subjectivities,a shifting and experiential exhibition that, in relation to Tramway’s main gallery, invites the audience to enter into and navigate the installation.

In this vein Hecker’s works propose new experimental forms which weave together the histories of conceptual art, minimalism, and performance. Thus, Hecker’s provocative, multi-sensory environments emphasise the cultural resonances of sound, yet resist being exhaustively described by any one disciplinary approach.

Hecker is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.

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Exhibition supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Kvadrat Soft Cells.