Solo exhibition Phantom Streams at Inhabiting Basis, Frankfurt, Germany, 2020

Inhabiting basis catalogue text

Out of a dense field of voices, streams of words materialize, then disappear; fade away or become entwined, forming new structures. What is being heard is affected by the positioning and movement of the listener in the space. The voices flicker, alternating between concrete and abstract, male and female. It is a dynamic and continuously reactive process, a listening experience that resists being repeated. Instead, Alexander Tillegreen‘s sound installation Phantom Streams (Zyklus I) opens up an acoustic space that addresses the act of listening itself as an activity that is never fully conscious or controllable and can only be described subjectively and individually. By means of seriality, Tillegreen uses a specific technique of voice recording, editing and a spatial multi speaker setup, to evoke an immersive experience in which the real is destabilized with illusory elements in the listener‘s mind. In this way, language is experienced as something that is not simply there but that must be filtered and interpreted out of a mass of acoustic information. The work thus takes a phenomenon from music psychology as its starting point in order to address the question of how language is perceived. So-called “phantom words” may have the potential to create auditory illusions in the listener and expand the original meaning of a source word to the extent of hearing other words and even whole sentences that are not there. The material used for the sound composition and its artistic arrangement was developed through interdisciplinary research conducted in dialogue with scientists and sound technicians at the Max Planck Institute including an ongoing laboratory study on psychoacoustics. Tillegreen’s work plays with the fact that the act of listening does not merely involve the reception of acoustic signals but that the incoming information and the understanding and attribution of meaning to it largely depend on the listener’s individual experiences, expectations, language background and cultural and subjective situatedness. The idea of a mental archive determined by a dynamic state that is not fixed on a certain system of order informs both Phantom Streams (Zyklus I) and the sculptural work Untitled(diffusor). The seriality of this work’s minimalist objects reflects the rhythmic and repetitive characteristics of the sound piece, while its compartments evoke the image of an archive. Its cellular structure produces a subtle shadow-play, the complex tonalities which are dependent on the viewer’s movements through the room, thus echoing the variable listening experience of Phantom Streams (Zyklus I). Tillegreen’s graphic prints function similarly as visual reflections of different modes of and states related to sound and to listening. Together with his objects they constitute Tillegreen‘s ongoing investigation into the connections between the visual, the sculptural, and the auditory.

Figur (Diffusion, Synchronisierung, Ausgleich), 2017 combines two sound sources: White noise as used in private and public spaces to mask distracting and unwanted sounds and to provide privacy. The piece also contains voice samples of the inner monologues of the protagonist Eleanor Lance from the 1963 feature film The Haunting by Robert Wise. "As part of the installation a configuration of Charlotte Posenenske‘s Vierkantrohre Serie D (1967) isin included. Posenenske‘s work was often shown in contexts of working environments and public spaces in which white noise and sound masking was also used. The ‚Vierkantrrohre‘ functions like a modular system, analogues for the artist to a musical score, open to interpretation. Adapting to the spaces they are in, merging with the architecture they are becoming almost invisible while still maintaining a strong sculptural presence. In this way Posenenske‘s objects reminds of the impact sound and white noise has on acoustic environments. On a material level there seems to be a synaesthetic relationship between the sound and the objects both carrying metallic qualities in timbre and surface."