Kurt Hentschläger

"Measure" is part of an emerging body of work, which reflects on concepts of nature in the 21st century. As nature filtered through digital communications channels becomes the new norm, the boundaries start to blur between mediated and physical experience. Hentschläger’s work probes the question whether “nature” and the concept of the “original” can still culturally exist in the Anthropocene, in this age of human influence. What exactly is real, in the sense of the pure and original, and what is to be understood as constructed and artificial? Measure has been commissioned by Audemars Piguet.

Part of the Optofonica #1 series

Instead of creating mere objects of aesthetic seduction, a new form of art is surfacing that invites audiences to transcend the limits of habitual perception. It seeks to shift the observer’s attention from the physical objects that stimulate perception to the act of perception itself.

«Reset» was created as an Austrian submission to the Venice Biennial 2001. The deliberate exclusion of a human likeness leads to an increasingly abstract, spatial and sound experience. The work concentrates on perceiving a vibrating, sound and light space whose inner coherence is no longer produced by a prearranged sound-image relation, but rather comes about through the consecutive synthesis of individual, independent samples. Ulf Langheinrich

Granular Synthesis are the new media, video art, and music duo Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich, who take their name from the practice of sampling "microsounds" (audio clips lasting 1 to 50 milliseconds) to create new compositions. Part of a series of video and installation pieces, "Sweetheart" features a single close-up of performer Akemi Takeya. It was produced for the Austrian T.V. network ORF.

MODELL 5 is a performance or installation in which the face of Japanese performer Akemi Takeya is subject to drastic time-based interventions that create in essence a cyborg-like hybrid, between human and machine. A roller coaster dramaturgy following the "life" of the four clones on screens. Using a technique derived from the principals of the sound design technique called "granular synthesis" but applied to the rather fat grains of single video frames (visual content and sound), Granular-Synthesis manages to evoke from a few expressions on the face of the performer Akemi Takeya, a frenzied exploration of the alter ego within touching distance.