CD – Mille Plateaux

In 2000, Thomas Köner was awarded the New Media Prize by the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, a recognition that undoubtedly helped his career which he began as a sound engineer for cinema before moving on to complex audio-visual multimedia installations. Daikan is the title of the composition that earned him initial recognition and was originally released in 2002 on Mille Plateaux, after having been recorded live the previous year at a media art festival in Osnabrück. Sound sculpture, sound design and performance become the core creative focus for Köner, an eclectic experimenter who was in the right time and place to realise the potential of new artistic expressions within the wider world of new media art. ‘Daikan’ is a Japanese term that means ‘the coldest’ or ‘the coldest part of the year’ and is the title of a work developed over three individual tracks on this release. The sounds seem to be a form of spiritual recovery, something that profoundly alters our sense of perception. They play with spatial qualities that describe uncertain horizons where visibility exists as a subtle and undetermined phenomenon. For Köner, the physical landscape reflects the mental space. These two elements are brought together flawlessly on the final track ‘Banlieue Du Vide’, another somewhat historical work, its live performance version has been seen by thousands of spectators at various museums and galleries including the Pompidou Centre, and at events such as Ars Electronica. The audio-visual project combined more than 3,000 images taken from surveillance cameras with the noise of invisible traffic. This is the first time that ‘Banlieue Du Vide’ has been released and is another way for Köner to nullify the importance of audio-video interaction in his work. He is convinced there is no relationship between these two fields and considers them independent of each other, and able to complete each other. The German artist is always at ease with conceptual paradoxes, ‘music itself means nothing concrete’, he claims, recalling with a materialist perspective how it is a social practice, determined by other social structures which in turn, are governed by very specific overarching processes and economies.

 

Thomas Köner – Daikan / Banlieue Du Vide