a Montreal multimedia-art duo

renders the invisible in complex works

of interactive audiovisual originality

ın a state of controlled
hypnosıs
experiencing skoltz_kolgen
BY TOBIAS C. VAN VEEN
 cd wav2

summer 2007 | #98 musicworks 31

 each track is an audio
from which Phono
a rtists in the twenty-first century are beginning to realize
the impact of computerization: that with digitization all is
data, and all data is interchangeable. Sound and vision are
digitally flattened, offering radical potential to a transactive
aesthetics between particle and wave.
The interactive installations and live performances of Montreal
duo Skoltz_Kolgen have pioneered the interweaving of the aural
and the visual. Skoltz_Kolgen craft a fragile yet powerful negotia-
tion between what is seen and what is heard. Whether exploring
the space of quantum flux or the fleshiness of the body, they craft a
world in which the interplay of particles dance before our eyes and
shudder within our ears.
fragility in the wireframes
Dominique T. Skoltz and Herman W. Kolgen, charming yet elu-
sive, pose against a cement wall in the basement of The Society
for Arts and Technology in their home city of Montreal.They are
Skoltz_Kolgen.
Beyond the elemental facts lies a universe—a body of work of
some fifteen years, comprising all the intricate worlds the two artists
have programmed into being.
askaa
32 summer 2007 | #98 musicworks
Multimedia would be the old word to describe interdisciplinary
approaches.Yet multimedia is insufficient here, for Skoltz_Kolgen
appear to chart more a realm of the revised media than of mul-
timedia. Old media are incorporated and remixed. At the same
time, something of an esoteric or hermetic knowledge permeates
these endeavours.Their live cinema performances and interactive
audiovisual installations present an exoteric delicacy and fragility
of image and sound, while inwards a conceptual enigma struggles
to express itself. Experiencing Skoltz_Kolgen leads to a hypnotic
love of the inexpressible, as it is manifested in the technologically
complex. Opening oneself to seduction is perhaps the first moment
in loving the machine as do Skoltz_Kolgen.
cirkus (1996)
To begin at the beginning it is necessary to refer to a still uncom-
pleted work. CIRKUS (1996) focuses on the “corrosive effect of
time on objects and human beings.” Chemical processes act through
time on this work-in-progress, as film and various recording media
are immersed in corrosive baths.This unshown work explores the
degradation of media hidden from the public, calling for a time
line that, as the prospectus hints, coincides with the artists’ lifespans
themselves.The corrosive effects of chemicals on media parallel the
corrosion of the body in space and time.We are led to contemplate
the mediatization of the physical and the metaphysical: the way in
which both the real and the surreal are expressed in strange media,
the framework wherein the organic becomes real and thus surreal
in the digital medium.
Like organic growth in all directions, like a mathematical equa-
tion, thinking and writing on Skoltz_Kolgen demands a certain
immersion in their processes.To meditate on Skoltz_Kolgen calls
for isomorphic reflection.
 universe,
oFictions emerge.
—Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant than the Sun

askaa (2005) OVSKII

The motif of growth permeates asKaa, an “interactive ecosystem
inspired by vegetation,” first shown at the Musée d’Art Contempo-
rain in Montreal at Mutek in 2005. Two gigantic screens project
the slow evolution of virtual plants, while genetically patterned
sounds modify the organisms’ development, i.e., the sound changes
and flows in a way similar to generational modification of genetic
elements over time: as the sounds change and morph into new
patterns, the plants grow in different ways.Thus, sound played into
the installation in real time acts as a further catalyst and modifier
of the ecosystem's growth, which responds in turn, not only visu-
ally but sonically, by regulating the rhythm of its perpetual evolu-
tion. A series of performances by guest microsound artists during
the installation stimulate this environmental feed-
back system. Skoltz_Kolgen request that the artists
respect the breath of the ecosystem as it responds to
the influx of live sound. By working with the sonic
rhythms of silence that govern the cybernetic instal-
lation, one can emphasize the growth potential of the
botanical environment. asKaa is not only an inter-
active, ever-evolving interplay of sound and light
represented as a vegetative ecosystem, but a meeting
point of human to digital evolution—a new con-
ceptualization of cybernetics.We enter the space of a
possible coexistence with the ecodigital.At the same
time, the space and time of performance as well as the
technics of the instrument are reconfigured. asKaa is representations on a matrix” as it implements creative decisions by
both installation and instrument, an evolving digital life form and the artists and random patterns from the software. Dubbed a tem-
lifeless algorithmic code, which is to say it is neither fully one nor poral triptych, Ovskii marks the moment wherein the installation
the other, but the sign of strange media. In asKaa, the technobotani- and the performance blend into the programming and creation
cal plants are watered by virtual sounds generated in turn by fleshy of a piece of software which produces a cybernetic environment.
humans in concert with computers. Self-programmed software such as Ovskii provides the framework
for Skoltz_Kolgen’s larger and more complex projects.

ovskii (2002)
The technological components required for such organic inter-
activity are to be found in Skoltz_Kolgen’s craft with software
and programming. The digital tool LoeeFrek (2002) was created
by Skoltz_Kolgen in order to exhibit such performative audiovi-
sual works as Ovskii. The software “manipulate[s] and translate[s]
sound sources into a visual bitmap matrix, in real time,” but also
simultaneously interacts with the audiovisual field,“imprinting the
elf2b-alpha (2002)
The same year as Ovskii was developed, the ElF2B_Alpha instal-
lation raised ethico-political questions concerning the techno-
organic complex under investigation. Both a performance and
an installation for headphones and video monitors, ElF2B_Alpha
explores the ethics of genetic manipulation. As an audiovisual
installation, the non-interactive twenty-two-minute piece details

summer 2007 | #98 musicworks 33


elf2b_alpha
the transaction of sound to image as, on screen, the piece docu-
ments how various sonic processes disintegrate x-ray images of
the body. A “freeflowing contemplation with no scientific preten-
sions,” ElF2B_Alpha poses a lurking question about technologies
that entice us to program the organic through genetic code.
Each of Skoltz_Kolgen’s audiovisual projects present the
viewer—and listener—with vast worlds that reveal intimate and
delicate relations between otherwise imperceptible objects.We dive
into the skin of the body to play in its smallest organic recesses and
cellular operations, as in Epiderm (2004), or we explore the world
of particles and the flux of symbols, as with [Flüux :/ Terminal]
(2003). In the artists’ words, their work dives into a series of con-
ceptual enigmas that demand perpetual innovation of tools and
34 summer 2007 | #98 musicworks
strategies.Tactics of film, video, animation, sound, installation, and
performance come into play. At the focal point of each project is
an enigma—hypnotic, hermetic, esoteric—that, through the con-
struction of an environment, invites exploration. In their extensive
works Epiderm and [Flüux :/Terminal] Skoltz_Kolgen turn to noth-
ing less than the inner particles of the outer universe—quantum
or human—and the thin skins that scarcely separate fragile beings.
Here, art invades life as its computer-aided imaginary processes
blend with science.
in heaven everything is fine filament
Isolating their work in the sonic registers, Skoltz_Kolgen focus on
minute displacements of glitches and microtones, granular synthe-
sis, and pulses at low volumes. PostPiano 07.05 (2003, 12k limited
edition) and Hyalin (2003, LINE_014) align their undertaking with
something of the microsound strategy. Although microsound as
a digital strategy of splintering sound into its smallest elements
arose in the 1970s through the work of Curtis Roads, and was
developed into the tools of granular synthesis by Canadian com-
poser Barry Truax in the '80s. it was around the millenium that
electronic music composers outside the academy began explor-
ing the compositional strategies and tools of microsound. Gran-
ular synthesis became widely available as a software plug-in and
the flowing clouds produced by micrograins of sound became a
favoured production technique. While the new microsound aes-
thetic renewed interest in extreme forms of minimalism that bor-
dered on silence, it also explored its converse in the complex rear-
rangements of micrograins in a kind of maximalism of the minute.
In microsound, the pursuit of the tension between minimalism and
complexity is accomplished through ample use of silence inter-
spersed with challenging and sustained frequencies that plumb
the depths of the subsonic at the highest pitches of human hear-
ing. Artists negotiate between barely audible tones and clouds of
sound that irrupt into the realm of the scarcely audible. In contrast
to institutional avant-garde music, in microsound the rhythms of
house and techno—the drum patternings of Afrodiasporic cultures
turned alien through electronic means—are widespread and put to
infectious use. Microsound became not only the sound of a move-
ment but a tool to be put to use in the turntablist's arsenal. Record
labels such as 12k, Mille Plateaux and Trente Oiseaux catered to
the development of the microsound aesthetic—from beats to de-
structured soundscapes—while the Web site <microsound.org>
hosted an e-mail list, as well as a community of musicians and their tribution, as if they couldn’t bear to cut sorrow into a single frag-
projects. It is from this milieu that Skoltz_Kolgen intervene in the ment. Or as if their enigmatic remix process of creating music is
microsound aesthetic. Skoltz_Kolgen intensify the aesthetic by greater than the contemporary limit of an eighty-minute compact
resampling various sources and rendering their structure as skeletal disc. Loss is palpable as 07.05 marks its date through the gentle
as their visual realms. Small slivers of sound are attached to evolv- recontextualization of Kirschner’s piano playing, itself reminis-
ing rhythmic structures that disintegrate and rebuild according to cent of twentieth-century composer Morton Feldman, lending the
greater patterns that are then subject to greater dissolutions.While work an ethereal hum of moody ambiance and glitch texture.The
they connect these sound strategies to visual material, they establish work’s softness reflects the kindness of Skoltz_Kolgen’s strategy of
a reference point beyond both audio and visual registers in which the scalpel.What is enigmatic concerning the album’s production
both are at play. It is this ability to outline a conceptual enigma that is nonetheless concretized in its palette of sound. By resampling
could be translated into either sound or vision—but nonetheless Kirschner, who uncannily sounds like Feldman, Skoltz_Kolgen
requires the symbiosis of both—that renders their work as fragile bring to the forefront the debt microsound owes to the traditional
as it is powerful. instrumentation and compositional minimalism of Feldman. The
The aforementioned album Hyalin feels akin to Epiderm, insofar deliberate yet meditative pacing of Kirschner (as possessed almost
as it consists of increasingly pervasive levels of micropitched tones, in spirit by Feldman) is reflected in the stillness of Skoltz_Kolgen’s
not unlike the standing-wave work of New York's godfather of attentive remixes, as they focus on each note played in its tempo,
microtonal composition (and massive drones) Phill Niblock, or succession, weight, and dampness.Then this reflection is refracted
the just intonation of American minimalist and Fluxus heretic La as each piano note is transposed and then fragmented into splin-
MonteYoung (himself a summer student of Karlheinz Stockhausen ters of sound that reassemble themselves in skeletal frameworks of
at Darmstadt).Whereas Niblock and Young demand an eternity of bits and particles that slowly begin to evolve, speak to each other,
listening commitment, composing works lasting hours, if not years, and move alive as if one. Skoltz_Kolgen’s solution to minimalism's
which meditate on the depth of a particular moment, Skoltz_Kol- austerity, its tendency to fall into abstraction or mindlessness, is to
gen seek infrastructure, finding new complementarities in warp project another possible path, beyond all formalism, that acceler-
and woof to pry open and traverse. It is this conceptual enigma of
a greater framework, or wireframe, that is reflected in their modus
operandi. Whereas Hyalin is laser-sharp and amplifies the unset- hyalin
tling and uncanny (a feeling found reflected in Epiderm), Postpiano
07.05 amplifies all the gentle characteristics of Skoltz_Kolgen’s
approach. Postpiano is compiled or assembled by NYC-based Tay-
lor Deupree, the label’s curator and a contemporary microsound
composer (as well as ex-techno producer, suggesting something of
the movement’s origin in the ashes of alternative technoculture, a
meditative respite after the madness of rave culture’s ecstatic drive
to burnout).The work consists of a series of remixes by Skoltz_Kol-
gen of NYC composer Kenneth Kirschner on piano, but selected
by Deupree from a body of reintrepretations too great for a single
recording. Skoltz_Kolgen note that the remixes were completed
shortly after the London terrorist attacks of 2005 (a UK perfor-
mance was scheduled for the same fateful July day). Hand-num-
bered in a limited edition of 500, Postpiano 07.05 is not listed in the
12k catalogue (whereas one may find Post Piano and Post Piano 2
by Deupree and Kirschner), and remains as enigmatic as the work
itself. Skoltz_Kolgen themselves were unable to narrow their con-

summer 2007 | #98 musicworks 35


Flüux :/Terminal
ates, deliberately and delicately, the evolution of sound to the level
of an ecosystem in which it evolves in concert with the world.
Skoltz_Kolgen take the human piano assemblage, now digitized,
and make its numerical data sing in the languages of its code and
programming, languages which retain their organic trace, and the
mark of the date of death.
digital performance
and the mediums:
the tarot of the terminal flux
Like a techno track or software release, [Flüux :/Terminal] has evolved
through several versions, the latest of which is 5.4, completed in
2006.The standard version is described by the artists, on their Web
site, as “performance image/sound—diptyc rétinal for
two screens ”—in capitals (and with diptyc so spelt), as if deter-
mining by sheer force—and not unlike a Futurist manifesto—the
monumental impact of their endeavour.The piece is named a dip-
tych in the classical sense, being projected on two screens, split yet
hinged.The hinge suspends, in a tense arrangement, flexibility and
dissociation between sound and image in a bipolar retinal, with
stereophonic sound corresponding—or non-corresponding—to
luminous particles on the left and right screens. At times, the two
screens conjoin into the widescreen panorama one expects of film;
otherwise, the image and sound dissassemble to pursue different
paths. As Skoltz_Kolgen point out in their artist’s statement for the
piece, “The image is distorted, bearing the marks that the sound
imprints upon it, and becomes the fossil of the sound.”
36 summer 2007 | #98 musicworks
[Flüux :/ Terminal] appears a delicate representation of the quan-
tum world of flux. In this evocative, black space, nanobits circulate
and flock in uncannily organic patterns, displaying quirky per-
sonalities and traits of eerie tenderness. Circling clouds of sign-
symbols (numbers, letters, scientific and mathematic symbols) add
an ambiguity to the quantum level: is this the fabric of the uni-
verse, or the algorithms of a software program? Genetics or code?
Skoltz_Kolgen seem to suggest the complicity of the two, placing
us in between man and machine.We are drawn along a narrative of
quantum events as they enigmatically delve into the very wireframe
of time and space.
As the artists state on their Web site (see <www.skoltzkolgen.
com/fluux.html>:
A BIPOLAR EXPERIENCE IS THEREFORE BUILT BY
CATALYZING THE LINES OF TENSION BETWEEN TWO
INDEPENDENT BUT RELATED AUDIO AND VISUAL
WORLDS. THEIR DISSOCIATION IN ONE INSTANCE
AND THEIR SYNCHRONY OR SYMMETRY IN ANOTHER
ESTABLISH SPACE–TIMES THAT FAIRLY FLOAT IN
WEIGHTLESSNESS. THESE SUSPENDED MOMENTS ARE
SUCCEEDED BY FRESH CHARGES OF ENERGY THAT
ARE MASSIVE AND INTENSE. A NEW GENERATION OF
MEANING ESCAPES: ATTRACTION AND REPULSION,
INTERDEPENDENCE AT TIMES, FOLLOWED BY STRUGGLE
AND CONFLICT AT OTHERS.
Skoltz_Kolgen leave us imagining universal subatomic levels and
the quantum-level dance of strangely expressive quirks and quarks.
[Flüux :/ Terminal]’s popularity among diverse, worldwide audi-
ences attests to its success in rendering the invisible an elusive and
hypnotic experience.
 Neither film nor performance, neither audiowork nor sound-
work, [Flüux :/ Terminal] demonstrates its force through its ambi-
guity and its affect. Skoltz_Kolgen express a love with their work
that hints at the labour involved in its production. Sometimes this
involves troubleshooting technical blockages such as how to com-
pose sound in professional 3D-animation software such as Maya,
or overcoming multichannel difficulties of audiovisual interaction
with two or more projectors and joystick controllers. But this is not
to demonstrate the overcoming of technical barriers: it is to move
through a puzzle that hinders as well as reveals an elusive enigma
that only marks itself through its labyrinthine forces, and to grant
that hindrance the time to play itself out as it leaves traces—distor-
tions—upon screen and sound.
An aesthetics already found in the universe of [Flüux :/ Terminal]—
this wireframe galaxy of blurred distinctions between the organic
and inorganic—is now discovered as the foreign world already
inside us, so uncanny and yet so essential to our very being. As it
digs into the microscopy of cellular operations, Epiderm emphasizes
how the wireframe aesthetics of the subatomic is the prosthesis
already inside the enigma of the self: us fleshy things of flux, of the
network, of the electrical charge.
Wrought in fine, washed and wispy reds, greens, blues, and flesh
tones, Epiderm is as colourful as it is unsettling. In a soundbyte
(an explanation of this new term of mine will follow immedi-
ately), Skoltz_Kolgen have achieved the difficult task of animating
the organic (a word of explanation about that will also follow).
A soundbyte (an intentional play on the commonly known sound
bite) merges the ability of media to encapsulate communication

from sound to skin: epiderm epiderm

In this world of the infinitely small, if a human stood one nanome-
tre tall, a red blood cell would appear to be 1,759 stories high.
On the day they wrap up their Epiderm installation at Mutek
2006, Herman tells me their work is “not about technology.” Dom-
inique says they simply wouldn’t know what to say about the tools
themselves. It is the world that we cannot see that fascinates them.
In Epiderm, their obsessions turns to the microkinetic relationships
that make up the epidermis of the skin. Although the work pre-
miered at the Elektra Festival in 2004, it has come into its own with
version 2. Lying on our backs in a circle, immersed in a two-storey
blackened chamber with 5.1 surround-sound, we look upward
at a twenty-foot circular screen hanging from the ceiling. Later,
Skoltz_Kolgen tell me that they want the audience to “feel the
oxygen,” and so Epiderm begins in the blood, in the bloodstream,
with convincing animations of cells. Slowly, the world shrinks, as
Skoltz_Kolgen begin to pursue their elusive nanoparticles. At a
certain point beyond measure, what is organic and what is electric
or quantum becomes indistinguishable. Boundaries between cells
become permeable and Euclidean dimensions collapse.While we
witness the physics of a world we can mathematically describe and
thus animate, this world remains, despite residing in the innermost
being of ourselves, utterly foreign (and hypothetical—thus, art).
Skoltz_Kolgen de-compose a mirror of the self that exhibits an
unnerving and uncanny alterity (the state or quality of being other).

summer 2007 | #98 musicworks 37


silent room
into the briefest of utterances with the capacity of computing tech-
nologies to reduce information to a digital assembly of ones and
zeroes. Writing and reading an encoded language draws closer to
how Skoltz_Kolgen animate the organic. In all of their works, the
artists take on the task of making the machine appear before us as
organic process, not only in its sonic and visual representation—by
animating, through animation software, organic growth, botanical
or cellular—but in the machine’s anima as uncanny process of soft-
ware (language code) and hardware (electric and magnetic parts).
Skoltz_Kolgen’s imaginative realism strikes at every level, from
sticky blood globules to the electrical impulses between DNA
genes, until the impulse inwards and onwards leads to an expanse
of emptiness. Strange that a meditation on the body should lead to
its Zenlike flicker as an attachment; strange that, as in the work of
American minimalist composer Philip Glass, one feels the Satya-
graha, the introduction of truth and gentleness in the rhythms of the
body politic, as it dissolves in the moment of its deepest penetra-
tion. As the performance ends, not a few viewers have passed into a
meditative somnabulance. A few are asleep. Skoltz_Kolgen tell me
that a few have slept through several performances, only to awake
hours later, disoriented by their inner travels, emerging into a dif-
ferent day (or night).
The sonic environment of Epiderm is interlaced with the visual
register.Wispy sound clouds are generated through granular synthe-
sis as one second is divided by 44,100 sonic grains.A rumbling sub-
bass signals tectonic shifts in scale and the passing of microcellular
beings.The spatial arrangement of sound in 5.1 draws attention to
the essential role that listening plays in Skoltz_Kolgen's work.
38 summer 2007 | #98 musicworks
sculpting in time
Released on the Mutek Fabric sublabel, unaccompanied by its
image, [Flüux :/ Terminal], the CD, presents something of a problem
in realization, of which the artists are all too aware: how does one
disconnect the audio from the visual registers when the two are so
closely entwined? This problem has arrested the release of a [Flüux
:/ Terminal] DVD for similar reasons.Yet a CD of the sonic register,
risking the impression of being a soundtrack to the work, has been
released.
While the 12k and LINE releases accomplish a gravity of sound
that compels their solo attention and solitude, something of the
weightlessness of [Flüux :/Terminal] withholds the same experience.
While the imagination fills in the gaps and the piece is a fine craft-
ing of microsound composition, one reaches out for a disconnected
acoustic signifier, as if numb to a phantom limb of its own body.
Conversely, would the visual screens of [Flüux :/Terminal] reverber-
ate so strongly without their sonic reinforcement? The movement
and a-synchronicity of the whole piece appear to be worth more
than the sum of its parts. Because the audio proactively anticipates,
and in flux of motion, distorts and displaces the visual axes of the
Euclidean dimensions—dimensions that introduce depth to the
limitless black of projected nothingness—its force is dissipated
without its visual counterpoint.
One feels there is something spontaneous in the totality of [Flüux
:/ Terminal] that eclipses the movie magic of film and the composi-
tion of sound. While the environment of [Flüux :/ Terminal] has
been programmed, it is so only in the sense that we can overde-
termine a painting as a form of pre-programmed movement. As
turn-of-the-century French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote in
L’Évolution Créatice in 1907, the movement of the artist’s gesture
is a so-called and contradictory “unity”—the unity of an enigma.
Likewise, Skoltz_Kolgen’s audio, a sonic palette of sorts, as it invis-
ibly brushes its tip against the geometrical nodes, hovering over the
visualization of flocks of bird-like formations that spell permutation
after permutation of mutation singularity, is not a film soundtrack.
Thus the work is not perfect, nor completely under control; oth-
erwise Skoltz_Kolgen would have proved the mastering impulses
of humanity to be correct. If humanity could program a perfect,
computerized art, Skoltz_Kolgen's work would be nothing less than
the absolute calculation of the future. The concrete realization of
cybernetics and totalizing mathematics, if not all of metaphysics and

systems theory, as it is expressed in the attempt to compute life and
death itself, would be true.With the perfect predictability of all pos-
sible interactions in a system, the mysteries of art, the very enigmatic
visions of the oracle, would be reduced to the banal operations of a
glorified calculator. Life would not be worth dying for—and death
would not be worth living for.There would be no future under the
perfect realization of the mastering impulses latent in computer
technology—and there would be no art.
Thus, their work glitches. It lacks from itself when disassociated
from itself (the audio misses its visual twin), and even in its whole, it
points beyond itself, and breaks down.
Thank the fine filaments.
And thus it’s tempting to say that the work elucidates the enigma
of complexity to minimalism that marks the music of the spheres in
the twenty-first century.
rather than a story line . . .
(this chamber cinema of
light and shadow)
Streaming on the retina, ethereal fire poking in through pinpoints
left by holes in the black. And the furious sound, recombinated.—
from my notebook, after experiencing Epiderm, 2006
Skoltz_Kolgen emphasize, when they speak to me, their efforts
on a work yet to come, a work from the past which still seeks its
housing, and with talk of which we depart.
A work requiring more time and space than earthbound print
can implicate, the feature-length film-poem Silent Room, which
was first released in 2003 and has seen various permutations since,
has yet to see its full installation. Silent Room is a cross-section of the
lives of sixteen people, sixteen rooms, sixteen subjects, sixteen envi-
ronments, a tableaux vivant. Back-to-back, this intimate portraiture,
reminiscent of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) for its darkness, fan-
tastic otherworlds and obscure characters, totals approximately one
hour and twenty-five minutes when viewed linearly. Recut to its
original length, untold simultaneous experiences unfold over many
hours, as the making of the flowing image itself features over 7,000
digital photographs from a battery of cameras placed in “confron-
tations of various vantange points” which have been reanimated
and stitched together in a fotocinétique process. (The photograph
of Skoltz_Kolgen by Tanya Goehring, recomposed from distinct
and separate digital stills, echoes this process.) Likewise—and this
enigmatic isomorphism that risks discordia has been my thesis and
thus marked my efforts here—the soundtrack is generative of imag-
istic fluxes and organisms. Unlike the work of Lynch, “There is no
dialogue to foster understanding or any reassurances for the viewer.
Instead we remain in a state of controlled hypnosis.” The Gesam-
kunstwerk—Wagner’s term for total art work—of Silent Room calls
for nothing less than an actual structure, a building or house, with
each of sixteen rooms built, arranged and designed with objects
and architecture to each subject, with the film of each of sixteen
subjects playing simultaneously in each of the sixteen rooms. Noth-
ing less than an architectonic structure of audiovisual navigation, a
techno-organic, cybernetic environment unto itself. Neither exhi-
bition nor installation matches the demands of Silent Room’s instal-
lation-to-come, an installation that undoubtedly would call for a
further, transformative media ecology. Here, in the moment of the
arkhe—archi-tecture and archi-tectonic—at the threshhold of the
home, oikos, Skoltz_Kolgen attempt to draw us into the technoge-
netic process of life and death. Like this work-to-come, the words
that would capture Skoltz_Kolgen remain in the future. Sometimes
the expansive oversight of attempting to read it all misses the mark
of these uncategorizable forays in which seduction lies.
Tobias C. van Veen is a renegade theorist, a doctoral candidate in philoso-
phy and communication studies at McGill University, and a practitioner
of the technology arts. He is a contributing editor at Fuse <fusemagazine.
org> and Concept Engineer at La Société des arts technologiques (SAT),
where he curates Upgrade Montréal <upgrademtl.org>. Since 1993 he has
wrought strange art in sound, radio, and net art, performing and intervening
with laptop and turntables, renegade sound systems, and interventions of
inscription <controltochaos.ca>, <thisistheonlyart.com>. His writings on
the philosophy of technology, AfroFuturism and technoculture have been
disseminated worldwide.
fyi David Rokeby’s work, also involving generative installations,
is covered in Musicworks 87.
résumé français
Les artistes du XXIe siècle commencent à réaliser l’impact
de l’informatisation : avec la numérisation, tout devient data
ou information et l’information est interchangeable. Le son
et la vision sont aplatis ou nivelés numériquement, offrant
un potentiel radical à une esthétique transactive entre la
particule et l’onde. Avec ses installations interactives et ses
performances en direct, le duo montréalais Skoltz_Kolgen
fait figure de pionnier dans l’entrecroisement du sonore et du
visuel, menant une négociation fragile, mais puissante entre
ce qui est vu et ce qui est entendu. Qu’ils explorent l’espace
quantique ou celui de la chair et du corps, ils créent un monde
où le jeu des particules apparaît comme une danse sous nos
yeux et un frémissement pour les oreilles.
summer 2007 | #98 musicworks 39