Primary Information is a small press in New York City focused on fostering inter-generational dialogue between artists involved in, or indebted to, the strands of conceptual practice that began in the mid 60′s and consider the use of publication as part and parcel with their strategies. Recently they announced that one of their 2012 publications will be a text, Chimerization, by the composer Florian Hecker.
The book will document the latest of the research Hecker has been involved in at MIT on the subject of auditory chimaera –– the technical process of exchanging the envelope of one sound with the fine structure of another. The announcement for the text elaborates that, “the concept of the Auditory Chimaeras allows one to explore the relation between pitch perception and sound localization as they reveal a possible acoustic basis for the hypothesized ‘what’ and ‘where’ pathways in the auditory cortex”. Wedged between radical sound art and the neurobiology of perception, what’s of note to PI’s world of artist’s books is the way the text promises to realize its subject as an experimental typographic intervention –– a typotranslation of the sound works developed by Hecker into the technological enclave of the printed book.
Hecker’s versatility has found him at home equally in conversation with Meillassoux over at Urbanomic, as a student of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ UPIC sound system, and in installations with YBA Angela Bulloch. We’re particularly piqued to see how it all translates into the well-dressed word, not the least because the book also promises to sport an essay from continent. favorite, Reza Negarestani.
L'UPIC
Waiting for publication it’s a welcome occasion to go back and listen to the recent contribution of Duchampo-Bergsonian chimerization Hecker made to the wonderful Interruptions series run by Ràdio Web MACBA, Bregman / Deutsch Chimaera – 47 minutes in bifurcated attention. Bifurcating and interleaving two works by major psychoacousticians, Diana Deutsch and Albert Bregman, you can almost hear Pascal in background, “Quelle chimère est-ce donc que l’homme!”
“In this ‘open-air field where categories from musical psychology
and traditional psychoacoustics never manage to settle down, where we are
unable to provide a name or classification of experiential phenomena, one is left
with the task of qualifying what could be termed the ‘hallucinatory’.” (Hecker &
Sónia Matos in press with Robin Mackay 2010, 11).
More on Hecker can be found at his personal blog.
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