Artwork Format: Video

‘DIY Sonic Loophole Generator’ is an animated step-by-step how-to video that demonstrates how to make a sonic loophole generator with mobile phones. This is a sister artwork to ‘DIY Telephone Feedback Performance’ – which you can read about here. These works are presented together as an Audio Visual Installation with a limited edition poster that is given away so that the effect can be experimented with at home.

This video was Commissioned by Michelle Kasprzak for the Future Flux Festival in Rotterdam

This is a How-To video that illustrates how to hack into a self-flickering LED.
This experiment was conducted during the MusicMakers HackLab at the Artifact Festival at the STUK Kunstzentrum in Leuven, Belgium

With Arvid Jense, Elvire Flocken-Vitez and Create Digital Music.

Sample available here!
Thanks Amine Mentani!

Encompasing video, sound installation, photography and collage, Soziale Sollbruchstelle is an interdisciplinary artistic research project that iconizes and creates a fictitious universe for a forgotten piece of utilitarian technology. The work draws out patterns and juxtapositions surrounding practices of technology between a historically significant communist state and contemporary consumerist culture.

Manufactured from 1962-1989, the ‘Trolli ESM II’ was one of the very few models of lawnmowers made available to the people of the former socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Its most striking characteristic is its motor hood. Sitting on top of the machine, with two mysterious looking horizontal air vents, it looks like an anthropomorphic spartan warrior adorning battle armour. There is an added sinister quality to these objects, as decades of use has marked them as if they have endured a lifetime of battle.

Soziale Sollbruchstelle deconstructs this household device and transposes it into the high definition/sleek aesthetic setting of present day consumer electronics design and marketing. By concealing and revealing its attributes, this series treats the old lawn mower like a rarified object of luxury and desire. Viewers are compelled to step into the mysterious universe of the Trolli and confront up close how the glossiness of its setting falls away as the detail of its embattled and timeworn patina takes over. Soziale Sollbruchstelle evokes both a militant history and sci-fi dimension, where the Trolli is at once both worn out and weathered yet primed for combat against a future of unkempt lawns. Within the mystifying narrative built up by the works, the austere, robot-like icon further acts as an analog for the ominous nature of a society of unease, connected to machines of questionable intelligence, power and control.

Soziale Sollbruchstelle is an interdisciplinary artistic research project carried out during a fellowship at Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences (BAS) / Graduiertenschule at the Art University of Berlin from 2016-2018.

The resulting works in this project include:
The Watch, video installation
Sirens, sound installation
Armour, sculptural installation with found objects
Tower, photograph
Lookout, photographic tryptic
Operation Manual, photographic collage
Government Issue, photograph
Soziale Sollbruchstelle, publication (deutsche Übersetzungen finden sie am Ende)

Artistic Collaborators:
AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti)
Sophia Gräfe

Further artistic support and expertise from:
Jemma Woolmoore
Lena Maria Loose
Carolin Meyer
Artist Carpenter Berlin
Daniel Stigler

Soziale Sollbruchstelle was funded by the Einstein Foundation Berlin and realized with the support of the Berlin Centre for Advanced Studies in Arts and Sciences at the Berlin University of the Arts. The artist further gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and Halle14 Zentrum für zeitgenössische Kunst.

A Side Man 5000 Adventure is video series directed and hosted by artist Darsha Hewitt where the electro-mechanical “Cadillac of drum machines” is a window into a world of shimmering vacuum tubes, high-voltage oscillations and the basics of electronics.

A Side Man 5000 Adventure is a unique, long-form, episodic lesson both in media archeology and the basics of physics, electronics, and mechanical design. It’s the first ever comprehensive technical documentation of a machine that made history. And it’s a must-watch series for anyone interested in learning more about music, electronic history, or how things work.

All 10 videos can be viewed on youtube and vimeo.

A Side Man 5000 Adventure is a project realized in the context of the Art and Civic Media research program of the Innovation Incubator at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg and in cooperation with the Leuphana Arts Program. The Innovation Incubator Lüneburg is an EU major project supported by the European Regional Development Fund and the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Further support for this project was provided by FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) – Liverpool, The Human Futures Project and The Office of Equal Opportunity at The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.

A video series that exist between instructional content and documentation of studio experiments. Though initially developed to illustrate the development of a material vocabulary related to sound, low-tech communication technology, radio and electricity, the videos were released on youtube as a contribution to the pool of accessible technical knowledge exchanged within do-it-yourself, educational and science and technology communities.

This work was made in collaboration with artist Peter Flemming

Complete playlist can be viewed here

– 60 Cycle Hum Experiment (01:24)
– Cat Whisker Radio Experiment (01:54)
– Automated Tuning Capacitor (0:34)
– Chaotic Spark Interference on AM Radio Experiment (3:19)