Watch Out! of the box (as Luis B. says)

Watch Out! of the box (as Luis B. says)
(2011)
If you watch movies about caskets and boxes, you may know that only a TV character is able to take a
look inside the box. You will never follow the sight of the main character and you can only guess what
happened inside and watch the facial expressions of actors. TV-box: you think – why the camera is so
malicious?
Packets, parcels and packages also conceal their interiors from you. In particular watch out for those
extraordinarily bandaged with tape, those with inscription “fragile” and ticking ones. Watch out for cases,
covers, chests, cans, trunks, speakers and Pandora. Google adds to that list: casket of moonshine, sky
box, humidor, Chinese box, storage container, bulk bin, set-up box, matchbox, decorative box, kist,
mailbox, coffer, coffin and shipping container.
***
- Is it time?
[In the meantime the Voice of Third Casket asked:
“What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning,
two legs at noon and three in the evening?”]
- Yes. Now you will meet the biased mediator.
***
Jagoda Szmytka
“Szmytka’s music is not sonic design, but a laboratory of the body. Interfering with the instrument by
changing its tuning, disassembling it, and even destroying it, is therefore a kind of symbolic interference
with the body (cutting, dismemberment, mutilation) that resemble the anatomic experiments of the
Renaissance. The illustration to just in time is an old engraving depicting a cross-section of a pregnant
woman, where the baby has been replaced with a speaker. But operations also appear in her work in
a quite literal sense: in Watch out of the box! (2011) for cello, piano, and prepared speaker, Szmytka
slices the speakers open with a scalpel, ripping off parts of the membrane and taping it back up with
bandages.In contrast to many body art projects, Szmytka’s pieces do not produce sound with the body:
it is the sound that is the body. Sound has a physical nature; it is like a living organism that is capable of
experiencing pain and is subjected to procedures and operations. But as an organ, the sound itself hurts
(the composer, the performer, and the audience).”
Monika Pasiecznik
Technical support: Bernhard Sturm, Bernhard Sturm, Sebastian Schottke, Götz Dipper
(ZKM | Institut für Musik und Akustik)
Video, Camera, Editing: Moritz Büchner
(ZKM | Institut für Bildmedien)
Production of ZKM | Institut für Musik und Akustik