Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag. Rauschen (Noise)

The Berlin-based artist, composer, and theorist Jan-Peter E.R. Sonntag associates the fine arts, new music, and media aesthetics in his artwork, which is usually of installative nature.

His solo exhibition Rauschen (Noise), which is running from February 21 to May 31 (extended), 2015, at the Württembergischer Kunstverein both visually and auditorily, explores the relations between technology, noise, and rapture. In German language there exists a proximity beween the terms noise (Rauschen) and rapture (Rausch).

The show embraces three work cycles in three spatial formations: a quadraphonic Noise Space in which the exhibition visitors are subjected to the phenomena of noise and fog; a passage in which an abundance of objects, documents, and artifacts from and related to the apparatus operandi cycle are seen and heard; and a sound-film room where videos from Sonntag’s almost cinema cycle are serially presented.

The point of departure for the conceptual research project apparatus operandi is an anatomy of the modular synthesizer by Friedrich Kittler. The apparatus was single-handedly assembled and soldered by the literature and media theorist, who passed away in 2011, between the years 1978 and 1988. In a scenario that invoked Rembrandt’s famous painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, Sonntag and other leading experts conducted an anatomical study on a synthesizer model in the Medientheater at Humboldt-Universität Berlin. The aim is to read Kittler’s technohistorical theory, which understands culture and its media to be data-processing machines whose switching and control circuits must be laid bare, by studying and interpreting Kittler’s soldering work.