Phantom Voltage

Like an invisible architecture, the electromagnetic fields of electrical cables, radio signals, batteries, sensors, communication networks and other technical infrastructures penetrate and structure our everyday lives. Phantom Voltage gives this ephemeral spirit a sound body and visibility through installations, specially created instruments, and performative elements. Induction sensors translate electromagnetic fields into sound, light and noise, which enter into dialogue with one another. The cello acts as an analogue counterpoint to the electro-acoustic phantom sounds. In an experimental arrangement of corresponding objects, the performers create a sound landscape that is open to the audience.

‘I understood the silence of the ether. I never understood people‘s words.’

(Friedrich Hölderlin [1770–1843], Since I was a boy)

After Desert Bloom (2016, Karl Szcuka Prize as part of the Donaueschinger Musiktage) and Spectral City (including 2019 at the HeK Basel & at the ReiheM in Cologne), Florian Kindlinger, Christina Kubisch and Peter Kutin are now working together for the third time. For Phantom Voltage, the three artists have partly developed existing sound objects and installations, partly created new devices and woven them into an expansive composition that encompasses the audience.

A limited edition of sounding latex objects created especially for Phantom Voltage by the visual artist Liesl Raff (in co-operation with Peter Kutin) will also be on display.

Peter Kutin | Light feedback systems, kinetic objects, dramaturgy

Florian Kindlinger | Sound direction, live electronics, dramaturgy

Christina Kubisch | Electromagnetic induction objects, live performance

Mathias Lenz | Mechatronics, live performance

Liesl Raff | latex objects

Maiken Beer | Violoncello

Anna Resch | Production, dramaturgy

Sebastian Jobst | Production, dramaturgy

‘The Ghost of electricity howls through the bones of her face.’

(Bob Dylan, Visions of Johanna, 1964)

Phantom Voltage is the continuation of my collaboration with the German composer Christina Kubisch and the Austrian sound artist and sound engineer Florian Kindlinger. In a first collaboration in this constellation, the radio composition Desert Bloom was created for WDR3, an acoustic unmasking of the desert city of Las Vegas. The work was awarded the Karl Szcuka Prize for Radio Art at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 2016. This was followed by the multimedia spatial composition Spectral Cities (2019), which could be seen for example at the HeK Basel and in the Alte Feuerwache in Cologne. The project presented here now goes one step further and focuses even more decisively on the effect and conscious setting of electromagnetic fields. These fields generated by light sources or radio signals can be scanned using induction sensors and thereby translated directly into voltage. Phantom Voltage uses this technical fact as an instrumental basis: we extract different control voltages from seemingly non-existent fields that are not visible or audible, which we in turn use to generate or modulate further sound or light signals. A kind of live upcycling of electrosmog that is available to the artists in real time.

In the last years I have consistently worked on light feedback systems like those used by Phantom Voltage and have constantly developed them further - I have learned to play them like an instrument, to link them medially and to adapt them to given spaces/architecture. Works such as the kinetic sound installation TORSO#1, or the work ROTOR with the artist group NO1 developed. Both works were and are performed more internationally than in Vienna. (Peter Kutin)

As energy flows around our ubiquitous power sources and electrical devices, there is an electromagnetic aura that is detected live at Phantom Voltage. The spirit of electric currents that Dylan sings about in the preceding line of the song plays the first violin, so to speak. This ‘electric spirit’ is not exhibited exemplarily, it rather acts as a phantom in the sense of Derrida, in real time. Through a dramaturgical order and a clear setting, in the timing of the different media to one another, a full-length piece is created that has no central perspective and encourages the audience to change the location as well as the viewing and listening angle.

Through the pointed use of an additional, purely acoustic instrument (a violoncello), spectral (concerning the overtone structure) fusions of raw electronic and purely instrumental timbre occur at times. The cello opens an analogue, naked, human level that represents an important counterpoint for the dramaturgical progression. The interaction of sound, image, light, color, space and instrument is specially adapted to the spatial and acoustic properties of the Postsparkassa. The room appears in different facets and moods. In resonance with the sounds, visualizations and objects, the work of art ultimately manifests itself through and within the viewers themselves. (Peter Kutin, Florian Kindlinger)