darktaxa-project: exhibition, the wrong biennale, NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, 11-2019
Achim Mohné at the wrong biennale, NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf, curated by Florian Kuhlmann and Michael Reisch
Listen to excerpt on Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/nobasementisdeepenough/achim-mohne-track-1-4712-min-excerpdtdt
Titel: „You are listening to the digital data packet of an analog photograph in the form of a digital sound recording while the sending of an digital image in an email via a router”
Sound Track / Audio Cassette
Since technical evolution tends to unfold rapidly, human beings have not been able to evolve a forewarning sense of new forms of technology, for instance to detect radioactivity. Electronic emissions are also not sensually detectable. No one knows exactly how the technology of “wireless transmitting devices” affects humans. Radio, television, radiotelephones, mobile phones, GPS, computers, bluetooth and WiFi routers flood every place on earth with countless electronic waves.
“Recordings” of a standard WiFi router serve as the basis for the “Fritz Kiste”. Actually one can’t really speak of (audio) recordings since the electronic waves of the WiFi are soundless. Their energy triggers the sensitive microphones, since these have been placed directly at the remote transmitting antenna. The recording – made with a D-40 Tascam, equipped with one microphone for each antenna – tapes the different transmission signals on the right or on the left channel as a “stereo signal”.
The WiFi router transmits at 3.4 MHz and so generates 3.4 billion cycles per second. The actual reception of the signals – eg. recorded during the transmission of an email with an image attachment – are only a few seconds long, but are prolonged through ever deeper analysis. The fragmentation was achieved via different processes, digital and analog, and via ‘deceleration’. Thus fragments of a second were distended to minutes in length. In this way the router’s timing-in-seconds, much too fast for human perception, becomes open to scrutiny.
The results are partly ‘technoid’ by which sounds are very much dependent on the timing. Sounds emerge at a high transmission activity; send-pauses sound more ‘ambient’…
The track you are listening too is a recording of the signals radiated by a Wi-Fi router during the sending of an image of the first analog cassette recorder from 1963 – a Philips EL 3200 -, attached to an email to Ignace De bruyn and Jan Van Den Dobbelsteen on the 4th of May 2014. (47.12 min)
Audio Casette / published by "No basement deep enough" Edition of 60.