Sharon Stewart
I immediately felt a surge of warm interest in Leitner upon discovering his oft-quoted remark “I can hear with my knee better than with my calves” on Internet. I had spent some time investigating my purchased library “discard” of his book SOUND : SPACE from 1978, so it was with some excitement at meeting his work in “real life” that I approached the area allocated, yet fully exposed to the acoustics of the large exhibition space, for his work, where I reclined on the Ton-Liege, listened inside his StahlFederWellen and explored his Pulsierende Stille.
I tried to shed preformed, conceptual, expectations of his work, “sounds as constructive material,” “idiosyncratic spaces,” “space as a sequence of spatial sensations,” etc., and just feel the work, as I approached the two suspended metal panels, slowly walked, turned between them, exited, and explored the outside of the panel with my handheld.
A deep sense of calm and wellbeing flows into the tissues of my belly through the low, slow vibrations. The choir-like, shifting, tuba multiphonics fill my head and trigger the space behind my mouth and nose, the spaces animated when I sing. I relax further into the sensations, allowing the fountain-like spatters of Robin Minard’s Silent Music, both distant and integral, to glide over my skin. My skin suddenly begins expanding, filling and becoming the metal panels on each side of me. Somewhere inside this new skin, gigantic and pulsing, the part of me that is not my skin feels, ironically, very small, until, Alice-like, the small me expands to join my skin, at the same time singing and feeling cool water dance on its vibrating skin-surface, massive and impossibly light. I take some time to inhabit this new, continually slipping, escaping, morphing, perceptual body, until the part of myself that is still controlling “my” movements slowly maneuvers itself into the “outside.” I breathe and adjust myself back into the now-familiar aquarium of sounds in the large exhibit space. Curiosity brings me to sniff the speaker-head fixed on the outside of the large metal panel with my recorder.
My handwritten notes read: Sound and the body – sculpting space – sculpting the vibrational sensations of the body through sound – sculpting a sensorial body – sculpting a perceptive field.
Marcel Cobussen
I find myself between two large metal sheets, with solid threads attached to the ceiling, some 80 cm from one another ... I stand still and listen ... Nothing happens ... I move a bit ... Nothing ... I take a look at the outer side of each sheet and see a loudspeaker chassis, magnetically attached to it ... Something should be going on here ... I retake my position between the panels, close my eyes and try to shut out the sounds of other works and other visitors ... And then it is suddenly there: two rather soft, deep drones which remind me a bit of those throat singing Gyuto monks from Dharamsala, India ... Although the sounds are often drowned out by undesired noises, their effect is salutary and relaxing ...
Back home I read on Leitner’s website:
Interferences are directed onto the metal panels, generated by a frequency superimposition here of 74 and 85 hertz. This pulsation propagates itself in the metal bodies in waves; the metal panels start to oscillate. The human ear cannot register this oscillation range. However, the metal panels manifest the invasion of the frequency through vibrations, which start to define the space holographically between the metal panels.
(http://www.bernhardleitner.com/texts)
I try to compare what I read to what I have experienced in ZKM. Leitner speaks of “corporeal hearing”, whereby acoustic perception takes place not only by way of the ears, but through the entire body. And indeed, a bit like the booming basstones during dance events or the high frequency electronic bleeps or rustle, these vibes penetrate the body at different places. It seems as if the whole body is becoming one gigantic membrane. Head, belly, calves, skin – they are all welcoming and experiencing those acoustic and sensuous pulsations, thus provoking new modes of perceiving and experiencing the body.
‘Pulsierende Stille’ is another of Leitner’s projects that investigates the relationship between sound, space, and body. Leitner conceives of sounds as constructive material, as architectural elements that allow a space to emerge: sound architecture. Not only does space determine the movements of sound, the shape of the space itself is defined by traveling sounds.
‘Pulsierende Stille’ obviously has clear tactile and visual borders: by entering the space between the two panels the visitor becomes at least partially hidden from view. But only by means of constructing a private sound bubble or a sound space around the person, is Leitner able to create a new spatial experience, for it is “above all the intensity, the rhythm, the speed of the moving sound and their interrelated variations that determine the shape of a space” (Leitner in Earshot 4, 2003: 72).
Body, space, and sound thus enter into a dynamic relationship, the one affecting and being affected by the other two. Because of the existence of the other(s), they resonate, they vibrate, they interact, they move.
References
Leitner, Bernhard (2003). “Headscapes.” Earshot 4: 74-75.
Leitner, Bernhard. http://www.bernhardleitner.com/texts
Jan Nieuwenhuis
Listening is not the sole preserve of the ear. In Bernard Leitner’s installation Pulsierende Stille, sound enters my body through my skin instead of my ear. I stand in between two large metal plates with speakers attached to the outsides. The speakers produce two frequencies (74 and 85 Hz) that are more easily felt than heard. Because the metal plates start to vibrate, the frequencies become tangible; my body becomes all ears in between the metal plates.
To experience the bodily listening to Pulsierende Stille in full, it is necessary to become part of it. Boris Groys describes Leitner’s work as installation art and distinguishes it from other art forms as follows: “In the case of the installation the viewer becomes visitor” (Groys 2008: 7). To fully experience the work, the viewer needs to be transformed into a visitor, stepping inside the artwork in order to experience it. In the case of Pulsierende Stille, the visitor also enters the visual space of the installation, because “by allocating to the visitor a specific pose and specific place, [Leitner] makes him a visual part of his installation” (Groys 2008: 10).
The experience of being part (of the space) of the installation is intensified in Leitner’s pulsating silence. According to Vilém Flusser, “Persons listening to music can only listen well when they concentrate themselves, this means that they somehow shut down muscles and nerves” (Flusser 2011: 22).[1] Conversely, in between the metal plates I need to shut down the workings of my usual auditory receptors, my ears, and transfer it to my whole body to feel the vibrations. If I allow my ears to listen, I will overhear scraps of sounds from other works exposed in ZKM. If I listen with my body instead, I become an embodied listener who is one with the work, “because the acoustic vibrations not only permeate the bodily skin, they also cause it to vibrate. The skin”, continues Flusser, “becomes a link instead of being a barrier” (Flusser 2011: 23). I am in complete resonance with the installation; as I vibrate there is nothing that separates it from me, not even my skin.
In Leitner’s Pulsierende Stille, I need to redirect the working of my ears in order to experience my skin listening, a listening in which I overcome myself, because listening serves as “the gesture that overcomes the skin by transforming it from barrier to link” and the act wherein “[the listener] finds himself and the world not as a contradiction between subject and object but as a ‘pure relationship’, namely acoustic vibration” (Flusser 2011: 23). In between the metal plates, I become acoustic vibration, a resonance between the pulsating silence and myself. At the same time I become a part of the visual space of the installation for other visitors – as beholders – in whom they can see the gesture of listening.
References
Flusser, Vilém (2011). “The Gesture of Listening to Music”. Retrieved April 18, 2013, from http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.at/Portals/0/web_media/editorial/vlusser_E.pdf
Groys, Boris (2008). “On the Sound Installations of Bernhard Leitner”. In Bernhard Leitner, Bernhard Leitner. P.U.L.S.E. Räume der Zeit / Spaces in Time. Karlsruhe: Hatje Cantz & ZKM.
Vincent Meelberg
Does sound have and inside and an outside? This question came to my mind while listening to, and looking at, Bernhard Leitner’s Pulsierende Stille (2007). This work, which consists of two metal plates, roughly two meters high, placed close to each other, leaving just enough room voor me to stand between them. I thus literally stood inside the sculpture. At the same time, I stood inside sound as well, as low-frequency sounds were emitted, sounds that could best be heard while standing inside the sculpture.
Because of the low frequencies the sounds appeared to be almost literally in side my body as well. I embodied the sounds. Or did the sounds embody me? Did I became sound, or was I able to give form to the sounds, like an acoustic prism? Was my body the inside of sound, and the sculpture the outside? Or was the distinction between inside and outside eliminated by me standing there?
These sensations evoked a sense of intimacy, an intimacy that was also accentuated by the fact that I stood there in this narrow space, almost touching the metal plates. Despite being relatively simple, the work instigated a sonic interaction between my body and the sculpture that was in fact complex, complex in the sense that it raised questions with me, questions to which I still have not found an answer.
