PIETER VAN BOGAERTAMARONA@SKYNET.BE

Low-tech but highly interactive about Felix Hess

Paper for Almost Cinema (2009)

Felix Hesss art is humbling. You can only fullyexperience it when you are aware of your place as avisitor in this work and of the work in itssurroundings. This may sound very serious, but itsactually incredibly playful. The work is simple andlooks as if it has been cobbled together. It is smartart what else to expect from a man holding a PhD inmathematics and physics? And on the other hand it isvery straightforward from an artist in spite ofhimself. Its in the Air is the culmination of thismovement, this simplicity, that carefully consideredand yet aesthetically pleasing experience. Threehundred tiny flags that move to the rhythm of the air.It is the synthesis of an oeuvre in which air, space,light and time play the lead.

Movement (in the air)

Felix Hesss career started with a boomerang. Thisobject plays a light-hearted and amusing game with thelaws of aerodynamics. Its movement in the air iscompletely logical, yet so hard to explain, as Hess who embarked on his studies in Physics in Groningen in1959 soon discovered. At the time, his interest in

http://www.squarevzw.be/pieter/index.htmlhttp://vooruit.be/nl/event/1996

boomerangs distracted him from an ordinary career as aphysicist. After he obtained his PhD with a study onthe movement of boomerangs, he conducted postdoctoralresearch in Australia for further exploration of thesubject. Its 1975 and Felix Hess packed his bags forhis first trip across the globe.

It seemed obvious, just like the shift Hess made fromexact science to art. This change was related to a newfascination, one for frogs this time. He first heardthe frogs in his backyard in Adelaide, Australia.These frog concerts led to nightly listening sessionsthat became more and more intense as he moved furtherand further into the Australian outback, in a questfor silence and the ultimate listening experience.Hess first distributed the frog recordings on tape,switching to LPs later on. These were his first,albeit subconscious, steps in the art world. Its 1982and Felix Hess returns to the Netherlands. This markedthe start of a long oscillation between science andart. Just like a boomerang it all seems so logical.

Listening (in space)

The shift from science to art was also one fromaerodynamics to sound (and back again inevitably).When listening to frogs in Australia (and later inMexico and Japan) Hess started looking for other waysto share this unique listening experience with theaudience. Instead of two-dimensional recordings ontape and vinyl, he wanted to create a three-dimensional evocation in space one that incorporatedthe listener in the sonorous environment. He hadpreviously done something similar: his dissertation onthe movement of boomerangs was accompanied by three-dimensional images that had to be viewed with anaccompanying stereoscope. He wanted to achieve thisexperience with the invention of electronic soundcreatures, which had to convey the frog concertexperience in the space. Its a transition from asimulacrum (the recordings of the concerts that onlygave an illusion of the actual experience) to asimulation (a new experience that replaced theoriginal concerts).

The motivation for this new development in Hesssresearch had to be found in his diagnosis that thefrogs did not only produce noise during the concerts,but that they also listened. This meant that on top ofthe musicians becoming listeners, the listeners andthe surroundings became part of the performance aswell. For the creation of his sound creatures Hess got

all the help he needed from Steim, the association forelectronic music in Amsterdam. These creatures wereactually small see-through boxes filled withelectronics that produced sound as well as being ableto receive it. Boxes with a speaker as an electronicmouth and a microphone as an electronic ear. Thirty ofthem were mounted to the ceiling of the concert spaceto produce noise and listen to each other. A built-insound filter made sure that every creature coulddetermine individually what was a good soundproduced by other creatures, or a bad sound producedby the audience or the surroundings. The quieter theaudience, the louder the creatures, and vice versa.

Observing (in the light)

The concerts of the sound creatures usually took placein darkened spaces, for an optimal listeningexperience: sound and nothing else, similar to thetranslucent boxes containing nothing but electronics.This was not a simulacrum, but not a simulationeither. It is what it is: a situation in which theaudience, the electronics and the surroundings reactedto each other. In the best case this situation lead toa different way of observing. Or more precisely, to acertain sensitivity, as Hess prefers to call it. Allhis work revolves around this science of sensitivity.A system that he continued to refine as it evolvedfurther and further away from technology.

The culmination of this development can be admired inIts in the Air. Just as with the sound creatures,the artist assembled each of the three hundred tinyflags in Vooruit personally. Cybernetic bricolage,with the difference that no electronics were used forthese wholly interactive flags. Each flag consists ofa wafer-thin sheet of rice paper, a pole made out ofbalsa wood and a small piece of lead as thecounterweight. This construction rests on a pin whichturns around in a small glass bowl, made from a brokenbike light and mounted on a silver stand. A structureof endearing simplicity, which is so sensitive that itreacts to the slightest current of air. Currentscaused by an opening door, the sun entering the room,or a visitor passing by. Nothing more, nothing less. Apure Zen experience.

Becoming (in time)

This is a work of art to enjoy in silence. This isalso Hesss view, who still seems to struggle with histitle of artist (just like he places himself on thesidelines of science). This piece makes itself. It isbased on an admirable respect for the space and the

visitors, who, through their presence, movements andobservations, become just as important as the artistand the work of art itself. This is a work that movesthe focus of the aesthetic experience from expressionto impression. The result is a shift from awareness ofthe outgoing to sensitivity to the incoming. The frogsand sound creatures listen, the flags react.

When visiting Hess in Groningen, surrounded by twocrackers a loudspeaker, made from a piezo plateclenched between a flat stone and a piece of balsawood that reacts to air currents that have beensitting on the windowsill for so long that Hessconsiders them his pets, a dozen of sound creatures inthe corners of the house, a flag on the TV and ancientart by Japanese Zen monks on the walls, I have tothink of John Cage. The late American composer basedhimself on the same Buddhist-inspired Zen philosophyand a similar sensitivity to the surroundings and theaudience (just think of 433, the composition inthree movements for a stopwatch and a pianist whodoesnt touch the piano) and to his own physicalpresence (think of his visit to a soundproof roomwhere he was confronted with the high-pitched tones ofhis own nervous system and the low tones of his bloodcirculation). This kind of art is a process that makesthe invisible visible, the inaudible audible, theintangible tangible.

Being (as a whole)

In one of his last creations Hess returns to sound,the element it all started with. Not the sound offrogs this time, but that of changing air pressure the same natural phenomenon that is used for thecrackers and the flags both going by the titleIts in the Air. Changes in air pressure produceinfrasound, which is inaudible to the human ear. Onthe album that accompanied his book Light as Air, heaccelerated these sounds 360 times, so that theybecame audible. On this album you can hear thecracking sound of thousands of doors opening at thesame time at the start of the day, passing airplanesand the rushing of the ocean, miles away. Bycompressing one day in four minutes, a whole newrhythm is created. This rhythm is essential for aproper understanding of Hesss work. Its the rhythmof the scientist on the sidelines, of an artisticoutsider who does not have to survive on the proceedsof his work and does not have to perform underpressure, who can afford to remake existing work andrefine earlier processes.

The rhythm, time and attention for the viewer and the

surroundings that Hess shares with an artist like JohnCage are essential for an optimal experience of hiswork. You can look at one of his flags and be amazedby the simplicity of the construction. You can blowyour breath on it and be impressed by its sensitivity.But it only works if you take your time and are opento the movements that produce this beauty. The rhythm,the sensitivity to air, to light and the space makethis work the abstract and at the same time theculmination of Hesss work. You can only be amazed bythe simplicity of it all. A simplicity that is alwaysin direct relation to the world. A humblingsimplicity.

Light as Air, the book featuring texts by and aboutFelix Hess was published by Kehrer Verlag, Heidelbergin 2001. ISBN 978-3-933257-65-9