Granular Synthesis
«Pole»

Ulf Langheinrich and Kurt Hentschlager have worked together as an artistic duo since 1991 on the ‘Granular Synthesis' project. Their obsessive visual language, developed from the performance art tradition of direct physical perception, has consistently evolved towards an audio-visual live experience, whose most recent state of aggregation, with the name of 'Pole', was seen in Germany in 1998. Mixing live with the aid of software they developed themselves, the two artists sample, shift, loop and amplify tiny synthetic units of image and sound – which they call 'grains' – of the singer Diamanda Galas to produce a condensed, invasive stimulation of the senses. A frontal projection onto five or seven parallel screens, stroboscopic effects, rapidly repetitive hypnotic or numbing visual patterns and sound frequencies with bass tones as low as -40 db, which the audience physiologically 'hears' through the body, combine to create an effect of conscious polarization and the removal of all perceptive distance from this stream of audio-visual data.

Rudolf Frieling