Eko. Kunst, Klang und Archiv

In the organizer's words:

Eko is a digital instrument that works with elements of artificial intelligence and the tradition of call and response to present the sound archives in the collections of the Ethnological Museum in the Humboldt Forum in an innovative way and to create new compositions from them.

The digitized recordings from the archive are not alienated, but analysed by Eko for their musical core elements, contextualized and subjected to an automated reinterpretation that is juxtaposed with the original. Following the tradition of call and response, Eko first plays the original recordings and only then produces an echo that generates new sounds based on the recordings.

You can find out what this echo sounds like and which algorithms Eko uses in this edition of Spätis with sound artist Hannes Fritsch and Albrecht Wiedmann, head of the Phonogramm-Archiv of the Ethnologisches Museum.

Eko is a work commissioned by the Humboldt Forum Foundation in the Berlin Palace in collaboration with the Ethnological Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Sound Archive of the Humboldt University of Berlin, conceived and technically realized by Ars Electronica Solutions and Garamantis.

Hannes Fritsch is a sound engineer, sound director and sound artist. He has been working with sound in space, spatialization and live electronics for 15 years in the context of numerous collaborations and his own works. He is particularly interested in the interplay of many loudspeakers in different constellations to create special soundscapes. To this end, he used conventional playback methods such as wave field synthesis and developed his own concepts. His work has taken him to the Institute for Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Volksbühne Berlin, among others.

Albrecht Wiedmann is the curator responsible for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in the media department of the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst. He first trained as a sound engineer and then studied comparative musicology, musicology and journalism. He has worked as a sound technician at the Ethnologisches Museum since 1998 and has held his current position since 2019.

Further information: free of charge. Language: German. Mechanical arena in the foyer. Part of: SPÄTI