Thomas Wagensommerer

TE-R’s video renders ter­rain from real satel­lite elev­a­tion and ocean-depth data, in which the sea repeatedly breaks through and the image oscil­lates between water and land. Tex­tures move between water, earth, gold and oil. Struc­tured in mod­u­lar events (day and night, nav­ig­a­tion routes, speed, script, scans of tech­nical ana­lyses), the work evokes voy­ages and colo­nial car­to­graph­ies along­side Sánchez-Chiong’s live com­pos­i­tion.

A grow­ing net­work of inter­con­nec­ted web pieces that share one visual lan­guage: the house glyph ⌂, void black and phos­phor green. Its nodes include an ASCII ren­der­ing of a bed, a house arranger, a road map of houses, cos­mo­lo­gical sim­u­la­tions and a par­ti­cip­at­ory voting install­a­tion that steers a real-time scene.

Visu­als for HUUUM’s “folk music from the future”, which joins vocals from sev­eral regions of Iran with free jazz, elec­tron­ics and the­at­rical masks and cos­tumes, explor­ing the space between tra­di­tion and mod­ern­ity.

A live audi­ovisual set join­ing Rojin Shar­afi’s genre-cross­ing digital music (noise, folk, ambi­ent, metal and con­tem­por­ary music) with TE-R’s visual prac­tice, which moves between image, game and code.

Work­ing from the depot of the museumkrems and its hold­ings of prints by the Baroque painter Martin Johann Schmidt, Wagensommerer trained a machine-learn­ing model on Schmidt’s graphic work. The install­a­tion shows the stages of learn­ing rather than fin­ished res­ults, just as the prints them­selves were pre­lim­in­ary stages of larger altarpieces. Oppos­ite, vis­it­ors walk through an anim­ated ver­sion of the depot and appear in it as fig­ures via webcam. The work raises ques­tions of ori­gin­al­ity, author­ship and who con­trols access to data.

The Schall­feld ensemble, com­poser and elec­tronic musi­cian Jorge Sánchez-Chiong and TE-R rein­ter­pret a media space as a cinema con­cert, join­ing live ensemble play­ing, turntables and elec­tron­ics with moving images.

In the 2016 match between Lee Sedol and Deep­Mind’s AlphaGo, there are a few seconds in which Sedol reacts to move 37, a move out­side the game’s entire cul­tural his­tory, with a rare ambi­val­ence between fas­cin­a­tion and aver­sion. Machine-learn­ing frame inter­pol­a­tion stretches this moment of recog­ni­tion to sixty minutes. The thou­sands of syn­thes­ised in-between frames expose the gaps and arte­facts of the trans­ition itself.

A gen­er­at­ive pro­jec­tion on the medi­eval city gate of Krems in which the image keeps trans­form­ing itself. Start­ing from struc­tures of the human body, cut and trans­formed com­pu­ta­tion­ally, the work briefly fuses archi­tec­ture and body, treat­ing urban space as a trans­lu­cent skin.

A week-long cho­reo­graphic assemblage of human and non-human actors around alu­minium, a mater­ial that is both every­day and eco­lo­gic­ally destruct­ive. Through dance, text, sound, film, light and lec­tures, and with mater­i­als brought in by vis­it­ors, the work traces alu­minium’s mater­ial, geo­lo­gical, ana­tom­ical and pop-cul­tural entan­gle­ments, draw­ing on new mater­i­al­ism and cri­tiques of the Anthro­po­cene. Wagensommerer cre­ated the sound and closed the week with a con­cert.

A five-second sample, the word “now” from Céline Dion’s It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, is stretched into a year-long audio stream of 31,556,952 seconds by a net­work of small, mutu­ally feed­ing applic­a­tions. The present becomes a con­tinuum in which shift­ing micro-timbres sur­face, and every use of #NOW on Twit­ter makes the com­pu­ta­tional labour of the machine aud­ible. The first work of the Kontinuum series by Deutsch­land­funk Kultur, Ö1 Kun­stra­dio and CTM Fest­ival.

Irra­di­ation’s album Xeelee trans­lates cos­mo­logy and quantum phys­ics into elec­tronic music, draw­ing on Stephen Baxter’s hard sci­ence fic­tion Xeelee Sequence. Wagensommerer’s anim­a­tion renders the vast­ness and deep time of a uni­verse shaped by an unknow­able, ancient intel­li­gence.

Taking Edwin A. Abbott’s 1884 novel Flat­land, a two-dimen­sional world whose social order is expressed in geo­metry, as its point of depar­ture, the piece expands that uni­verse play­fully into many dimen­sions. The per­formers inhabit the bound­ar­ies between media, sus­pend­ing their rules and invent­ing new ways of play­ing and kin­ship, not to escape the world but to exper­i­ence it from another per­spect­ive.

The title refers to a neo­clas­sical villa hous­ing one of the Carib­bean’s oldest retire­ment homes, above a derel­ict dis­trict of Havana; from it unfolds an unstable nar­rat­ive of day­dreams and senile twi­light. Wagensommerer, as TE-R, pro­grammed a per­form­ance sim­u­lator, a game that drives the pro­jec­tion, its vir­tual char­ac­ters, elec­troacous­tic sound sculp­tures and the musi­cians’ score in real time, while itself react­ing to the play­ers and the DJ. The feed­back loop turns the stage into a walk-in border zone between the phys­ical and the vir­tual.

A piece about anti­cip­a­tion and prom­ise. Teas­ers, trail­ers, advert­ising frag­ments, scraps of video and particles of sound are set into a poetic, non-linear nar­ra­tion, an idio­syn­cratic dia­logue between stage, film and music. Expect­a­tion is ques­tioned by making expect­a­tion itself the sub­ject.

A one-hour per­form­ance of sound, gen­er­at­ive and inter­act­ive real-time anim­a­tion, bodies, light, objects and space. Its skel­eton is built from sonic trans­form­a­tions of foot­ball fans singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. On this found­a­tion the par­ti­cip­at­ing artists answer from their own prac­tices, and human inter­ac­tion becomes an intense, shared sen­sa­tion.

Two media operas by Thomas J. Jelinek and Jorge Sánchez-Chiong. OPERA of ENTROPY is a post­dra­matic “present-time opera” about the global crisis of dis­in­teg­ra­tion, built on the accounts of real people, with an inter­act­ive install­a­tion that turns the hall into a shared musical and com­mu­nic­at­ive space. Its sequel, OPERA of TIME, dis­solves the border between stage and audi­ence into a New Year’s Eve ball and asks how digit­al­isa­tion changes the way we exper­i­ence time.

Together with ÖNB Labs, Wagensommerer built a feed­back system that trans­lates the metadata of more than one mil­lion scans of his­toric news­pa­pers into sound and image. Only two para­met­ers of each scan are used: its width and its height. Everything that is rep­res­en­ted is dis­carded. The res­ult­ing sequence of res­ol­u­tions, exact rep­res­ent­a­tion without its con­tent, reflects on how his­tory is per­ceived, inter­preted and pro­duced.

The install­a­tion hides from its audi­ence: it exists only as code and as sound from speak­ers con­cealed in the exhib­i­tion space. Whenever someone, any­where, tweets the hashtag #silence, a record­ing of silence made in the quiet exhib­i­tion space is played back. The tweet’s length sets the amp­li­fic­a­tion: a tweet using every avail­able char­ac­ter is barely aud­ible, while a bare #silence turns the alleged silence into unbear­able noise.

An immers­ive audi­ovisual per­form­ance that ques­tions the aes­thet­ics of games and takes up the online phe­nomenon of the Let’s Play. The player becomes the per­former, an inter­me­di­ary between the vir­tual real­ity of the game and the phys­ical real­ity of the per­form­ance. The soft­ware is freely avail­able under copyleft.

The first even­ing co-cur­ated by the Bel­gian Nadar Ensemble and com­poser-turn­tab­list Jorge Sánchez-Chiong, join­ing data visu­al­isa­tion, noise, pop appro­pri­ation and com­puter games with con­tem­por­ary ensemble and elec­tronic per­form­ance into one immers­ive con­cert.

Six­teen sequen­tially pre­pared near-field wire­less routers span six­teen net­works, named “z” to “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”, each dif­fer­ing in range and there­fore in its mag­netic field. Every field is picked up by a tele­phone bug, a cheap low-tech sur­veil­lance device, and turned into sound, so that each net­work has its own rhythm and timbre. Vis­it­ors can log into a net­work and thereby subtly shift the install­a­tion’s over­all sonic arrange­ment.

A game-engine-based, inter­act­ive pro­jec­tion made for the former baths of the Prague Elec­tric Com­pany. In an intense, strobo­scopic audi­ovisual sur­round­ing, the player wanders across a model of a 3D-print­able, func­tional AK-47 obtained from the deep web; move­ment and chosen per­spect­ive con­tinu­ously dis­tort the envir­on­ment. There is no chal­lenge, goal or ending, except when the player, like a bullet, leaves the rifle and forces the applic­a­tion to restart. The applic­a­tion is freely avail­able under copyleft.

3D self-scan­ning extends the selfie into a new form of self-por­trayal, and the wish for pri­vacy seems as out of place as before. On the way to the per­fect per­sonal sim­u­la­tion, count­less failed attempts are pro­duced, mostly labelled simply “me” and left to decay in vir­tual space. Assembled into a game-like envir­on­ment, these objects form a cemetery of imper­fect iden­tit­ies that vis­it­ors access, explore and stim­u­late in an immers­ive, audi­ovisual and macabre way.

Every sound derives from a nine-second record­ing of a sen­tence by Sadie Plant at CTM 2014: “To let noise into the system is a kind of fine art.” For the visual layer, Wagensommerer mod­elled each char­ac­ter of the quote as a 3D object and recom­posed the let­ters as a gran­u­lar micro­cosm. The work stages the cyber­netic art of con­trol against the res­ist­ance of noise.

A speech-recog­ni­tion algorithm searches online video and audio for the word “word”. The phrases around it are extrac­ted, and the word itself is erased with the 1 kHz sine bleep of broad­cast cen­sor­ship. The res­ult­ing rhythm is tied to a poem on private cen­sor­ship, which the artist screams with a micro­scope forced into his mouth. In the final part, all gathered sig­nals and data merge into a Uni­code rep­res­ent­a­tion of visual and sonic events.

A poetic mono­logue of someone des­per­ately trying to reach a loved one is fed into a gen­er­at­ive applic­a­tion that recom­bines its phrases and words into new sen­tences on a small dis­play; their erratic struc­ture makes the out­come neither fore­see­able nor recog­nis­able. The vinyl-tape pat­tern around the dis­play charts the com­pos­i­tion of the mono­logue through quant­it­at­ive text ana­lysis: word count, read­ing speed, typing speed, fre­quency.

A motion-detec­tion algorithm is applied to ten seconds of video recor­ded in near-total dark­ness. Forced to find motion where there is none, it reads the drift of noise arte­facts as a moving object. This erratic, frame-by-frame move­ment is laser-engraved into a trans­par­ent record hold­ing ten minutes of white noise. Whenever the needle meets the engrav­ing, the noise breaks, and a gen­er­at­ive applic­a­tion stretches the last state before the break into amp­li­fied moments of trans­ition: a sonic image of the move­ment one believes to see in the dark.

A gen­er­at­ive real-time install­a­tion that pries open the Aris­totelian unit­ies of time, space and action. Con­ceived as an object-based theatre play on death in the forms of sui­cide, fatal acci­dent and exe­cu­tion, it takes its mater­ial from the soundtracks of expli­cit online videos on these sub­jects. Depend­ing on its cur­rent state, the system out­puts these sounds in real-time trans­form­a­tion and dis­plays the com­ments posted under each clip.

Nine hand­writ­ten texts describ­ing sol­ipsistic struc­tures over time are abstrac­ted by visu­ally amp­li­fy­ing their semi­otic rep­res­ent­a­tion; the digital source begins to pro­duce unfore­seen shapes and tex­tures, and this con­cealed inner archi­tec­ture is bound as a book. In the per­form­ance, the artist writes a pro­gram in front of the audi­ence that scans the book page by page, assembles its con­tent and finally out­puts its sonic rep­res­ent­a­tion, ten to twenty seconds long.

An object that works on the topo­logy of silence. Wherever it is exhib­ited, one minute of silence is recor­ded and ana­lysed byte by byte, and the unpre­dict­able sequence that res­ults mod­u­lates the live stream of sound and noise at the object’s loc­a­tion. Its archi­tec­ture makes it a sequen­tial amp­li­fier, pro­du­cing a con­tinu­ous, altern­at­ing stream of sound in both digital and phys­ical form.

Once launched, the applic­a­tion links itself to the BBC news stream and turns the incom­ing data into abstract sonic and visual struc­tures that grow through­out its run-time. By design, the stream gradu­ally exhausts the host system and ends in a crash. Just before, the applic­a­tion saves its last frame to disk; a readme on the SD card asks the user to send it to the artist for his col­lec­tion.