Format: Collaborative Performance with Valerian Maly

Year: 2015 – 2017

Materials:  magnetic tape, tape recorder, cutting tools, table, chairs

Duration: 2 weeks

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When John Cage conceived Williams Mix - for magnetic tape for the summer 1952 course at Black Mountain College, he had a kind of collaborative and participatory, today a highly relevant work of conceptual art in mind. With this work, John Cage anticipated much of what is very current today in electronic, for the most part digitally generated experimental music: granular synthesis, 8-channel playout, experimentally composed samples, unforeseeable and especially “unforehearable” experiments.

Valerian Maly and Vanessa Gageos are reenacting the process of the creation of the 8 tapes, while using new recordings from Gageos' personal archive, making a contemporary double of the original tape.

The work was done during two weeks performance at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum for Contemporary Art Berlin, during the exhibition “Black Mountain College”, a project by Arnold Dreyblatt, in 2015.

The process was also performed at the Interdisciplinary Symposium of the Forum/Institute for the Science of Art, Design, and Media “Black Mountain als Multiversum” conceived by Arnold Dreyblatt and Petra Maria Meyer, at the Muthesius University of the Art and Design in Kiel, 2017.

Photos: Ulli Richter

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