Documenting Florian Hecker’s multichannel psychoacoustic installation with essays, images, and data.

This book documents an exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien that took place from November 2017 to January 2018. In Hecker’s multichannel installation Resynthese FAVN, the auditory stimuli produced from the objects within the exhibition space and the synthetic sounds he composed were designed to subliminally override the mechanical processes of human sense. The result was an intervention into the psychoacoustics of the audience, dramatizing their subjective experience through auditory hallucinations.

The catalogue collects essays by curators, researchers, theorists, and art historians on Hecker’s work and its relation to topics ranging from musique concrete, Mallarme’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun, and computer music. The psychoacoustic phenomenon of Resynthese FAVN is illustrated with a series of tensor acoustic measurements resembling the colorized impressions of thermal imaging, which is followed by 270 pages of densely sprawling data tables abstracting sound and its textures into text.

Contributors

Matthew Fuller, Vincent Lostanlen, Vanessa Joan Muller, Michael Newman, Axel Roebel, Magnus Schaefer