What happens when contemporary art meets rural tradition? From 24th May to 22nd June 2024 the interdisciplinary art festival medienfrische brought together contemporary art, new media and village life in Boden, a small, secluded town in the remote Austrian Bschlabertal valley. Here, people from seemingly opposing worlds – international artists, local villagers and visitors alike – came together to connect, experiment and collaborate at 1,400m altitude.
Focusing on the intersection of new media, contemporary art, science, and business, this year’s festival theme, ‘Leere Zeit’ (‘Empty Time’), invited artistic works and reflections on the value of so-called ‘unproductive periods’, mirroring Bschlabertal’s history of depopulation and mechanisation. Over 33 days, the secluded 90-resident community transformed into an exciting experimental space, seamlessly blending contemporary media art with quiet countryside-life, while providing a creative breeding ground to explore questions around artistic creation, conventional working methods and encrusted traditions.
Amidst this unique backdrop, komplex – KULTURMAGAZIN had the opportunity to interview two of this year’s medienfrische artists-in-residence, regiment and Heyse Ip. The London-based artists share their experience of collaborating on their new experimental, site-specific sound installation Pipelife as part of their residency, and how they approached responding artistically to the unusual environment of Bschlabertal, in the midst of the Austrian Alps.
komplex: Can you tell us a bit about your artistic backgrounds and how you came to collaborate as an artist duo, particularly in the context of your latest body of experimental, site-specific sound installations?
regiment: Although our paths were different before, during our MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in London, we discovered a shared interest in sound and a common desire to attempt building ‚instruments.‘ My background in performance, theatre and dance makes my approach to sound very personal and textural, which means that, often, sound is the first element that comes into play, setting the tone for my work. I experiment with electronics, field recordings, radio, tape loops, contact mics and analogue gear. Heyse, on the other hand, approaches sound as a maker. Working with him has introduced an organic shift towards the object, which has been extremely interesting.
Heyse Ip: At the time, we both experimented with sound in different ways. I was making short films and installations and needed sounds to set the scenes. I started building instruments to experiment with foley sounds using a more analogue approach. Since graduating, we’ve joined the artist collective Five Years in London and share a studio. Our first collaborative installation, Untitled (Pipe Dream), debuted in London in January 2024. We aimed to create a site-specific sculpture that could function as an instrument, focusing on subverting the performer’s role. This led us to an object-oriented approach, making the sonic object the center of the performance instead of us – an approach we continued to explore as part of our medienfrische residency.
Pipelife is your most recent installation, which you’ve created and exhibited as part of your residency at contemporary art festival medienfrische 2024 in Austria. Can you tell us more about what the project is about?
regiment: Our aim with Pipelife was to create a site-specific, sonic and performative installation and continue our collaborative work focusing on ‚instruments‘ that are made with materials that are integral to the sites we choose. For medienfrische, we were intrigued by the hidden infrastructure of pipes in this Alpine setting – objects that aren’t typically associated with such a landscape.
Heyse Ip: Pipelife takes its name from the company that made the pipes we used for our work. The pipes were originally intended for 5G and energy networks in the valley but were abandoned in Bschlabs, which is where we found them. With this sound installation, we aimed to respond to the festival theme of ‚Empty Time‘ through examining the ‘life’ of these infrastructure objects. We wanted to explore how these pipes, often unnoticed, can interact with the landscape and its residents, and how the objects themselves could be seen to ‘experience’ the passage of time in this context.
Pipelife is set in the context of a very remote village in the Austrian alps – quite a stark contrast to the urban spaces you’re usually working and exhibiting in. What interested you in participating in this residency?
Heyse Ip: Participating in this residency offered a chance to immerse ourselves in a completely different environment and audience. In London, our work is often shown within a ‘big city’ arts community – if you will, but in Bschlabertal, we anticipated a very different perspective and set of reactions to our sonic sculptures. The residency’s invitation to share our work with other residents and the local community was also very useful in opening up new perspectives. It is easy to fall into a particular kind of ‘city aesthetic’, a very grid based, clean and crisp kind of artworks. Our last project Untitled (Pipe Dream) was that, hence we were interested in rethinking how our art interacts with its surroundings and how we can adapt our practice to resonate in a rural setting.
regiment: The premise of medienfrische was extremely interesting as it proposed an osmotic exchange between the artists and the host community, and invited the artists to consider that in their proposal, while understanding the challenges and the fragile ecosystem they are invited to inhabit for the period of the residency.
To be operating as an artist in the so called ‘global cities’ can also be like being in a fishbowl: no matter how big they may be, the question of ‘who do we really work for’ is ever present, as it could often feel like we are in a bubble that self-perpetuates. There is also a risk of becoming too comfortable in putting experimental work out in familiar contexts and settings, and it is interesting to pierce the comfort bubble when possible.
This year’s topic of medienfrische was ‘Leere Zeit’ (‘Empty Time’). How did your creative process evolve around this and in what way does your project respond to this idea?
regiment: I guess that our vision for ‘Leere Zeit’ evolved around the possibility to reimagine a different use of the pipes, from a perspective which is outside a human-centric, purposeful idea of time. Riffing off Walter Benjamin’s idea of time as “merely a substrate in which our activities occur and is insignificant of itself”, we imagined these objects as detangled from the burden of human, productive time. In that sense, these pipes were somehow not serving their intended use and were already discarded, forgotten at the edges, piled up. In quite an ironic turnaround we were told – only after we installed the pipes – that they will be going underground soon to complete the 5G and energy networks. Although we did not envision this, it has made the work even more ephemeral, and in itself beyond time.
Heyse Ip: In our collaborative works, there is always a sense of an ‘extraction’, to pull something out of its usual context, and transform it into a sonic object. We always came back to the philosopher Jane Bennett’s idea of a ‘Thing Power’. We are very interested in the question of what a non-anthropocentric narrative of an object could be, and in this particular case, the question of how an object itself might ‘experience’ time. In a way, by transforming these objects into instrumental sculptures, we aim to give them a voice and imagine the possibility of an object-oriented narrative. For us, the pipes being transformed into instruments is like a ‘parallel time’ that we, as humans, only intersect with momentarily.
A contemporary art festival and a small mountain village appear to be an unusual pairing at first glance. How did working in this environment shape your approach to creating new work, and how did you find responding to the characteristics and culture of the village?
regiment: Although the work could stand on its own and travel out of the Bschlabertal, the village and its people are part and parcel of it. Our project for medienfrische was site-specific already at proposal-level and inevitably shifted and adapted to the environment. The first few days of location scouting, talking with each other and to people and explaining our project were fundamental steps that led to the creation of an entirely new work.
Heyse Ip: The logistics of moving the 6m-long pipes turned out to be another aspect of the work and another element that bound our work with its setting and the community. It was only with the help of the locals, their generosity and their ‘emotional investment’ in medienfrische that our project could take place – and that we could even get ‘our’ pipes installed. The location of our installation and the people that helped throughout are inextricably linked to the work. We did hope that they could ‘see’ themselves in the project and, from the responses we received, it seemed that Pipelife resonated with the community in ways that went beyond our expectations.
One element that both your artistic practices seem to have in common is an interest in performance – can you tell us how the performative element comes into play for your sound projects?
Heyse Ip: Throughout our collaboration we have always discussed where we sit as individual artists within both our own and our collaborative works. In our collaborations, I think we both come from a position where we don’t want to be the subject of the artwork, yet we are both interested in ideas around what constitutes a performance.
With Pipelife it is definitely a deliberate choice to hide ourselves entirely from the audience’s view. It became much more about staging and making a place ready for a performance – but with no performers to be seen. We wanted to focus on the strangeness of the pipes in their sculptural presence, installed suspended from a storage shed and allow the audience to focus purely on the sound experience.
regiment: I think we both agree that our idea of performance in the works we create together is somehow itself a ‘work in progress’, shifting with the works and their characteristics. Having said that, a fundamental aspect is surely the fact that the instrument’s ‘voice’ is defined by its shape and not vice versa. Therefore, our role is to ‘activate’ the work, to let the voice speak for itself without the need for the audience to listen or look at us as ‘performers’. In Pipelife we went further as the only visible and hearable thing is the actual instrument in its full presence before – or better – above the audience. We gently pushed ourselves (the performers) away from view, so that audiences may wonder: Who or what is making these sounds? Is there even a performer? What are the sounds we are experiencing? What are we experiencing?
How do you feel your individual artistic practices complement each other in the creation of collaborative work?
regiment: This is an excellent question, albeit a very difficult one. I would like to think that as in any great collaboration, it is hard to tell what part of the work comes from one or the other. The encounter of two is more than one + one, it is entirely a third entity. Nevertheless, I think that our diverse artistic backgrounds come into play in some shape or form, and through a practice that is defined by a ‘call and response’ approach, the works may emerge and take shape each time.
Heyse Ip: I think we began working together because of the time we spent speaking about our individual practices, about the overlap of conceptual interest and the desire to make sound. I think we bring different practical skills and backgrounds into our collaboration which becomes its own separate entity. I would say that both our practices, although they inform our collaborative work, can also be quite different.
Anecdotally, engaging with new mediums and technology seems to be a bit of a ‘must’ in the contemporary art space these days. What’s your take on that, and how do you approach integrating new tools or mediums into your work?
Heyse Ip: I think we are quite conceptually-driven artists in a sense that it is more important to be conceptually relevant, rather than necessarily technologically. I believe in using the technology that is relevant in achieving the result of the work. In this particular case we even removed the use of a soundtrack and focused purely on the instrumental objects themselves. In a way, I think the fact that it was solely acoustic was more impactful for the audience. Through minimal intervention, this strange and abstract sound could be produced.
regiment: Our practices are very much multidisciplinary. We see this freedom to move across mediums as a via negativa – it is about the ability to strip down to the very minimum. For Pipelife we deployed only the tools that can carry the work at its best. In my other works, technology is often within the lens of object-oriented ontology. It is mostly a thing in and of itself, and not merely a tool for something. Therefore, I stay away from claiming any mastery or any kind of skilfulness on any or all the mediums employed. If anything, I may claim the contrary.
How do you stay inspired and keep your practice relevant in the ever-changing contemporary art field? Is it difficult for emerging artists to cut through the noise?
Heyse Ip: I think this is always a difficult question to answer. I try to draw more inspiration from outside the contemporary art field. I find it avoids falling into similar tropes, aesthetics or trends, especially when looking at other artworks on social media.
regiment: I am not sure we can really answer this one yet, the emergence is still emerging!
Are there any key takeaways from medienfrische that you would like to share?
Heyse Ip: I felt what was special about medienfrische was its openness to experimentation and the ‘type’ of art that was produced. Although the quiet village might suggest a slower pace and less pressure to focus on any kind of ‘output’, the environment and community inspired everyone to produce new artistic work by the end of the residency. The support of the artistic and local community also really allowed us to take more risks within our work. For example, in another scenario we may not have taken the decision to reduce Pipelife to a fully acoustic performance and let the objects speak for themselves – which turned out to work really well in the space and context of the work.
What’s next for you? Are there any new projects in the pipeline that we can look forward to?
regiment: In September 2024 – again together – we will take part in the Dystopia Sound Art Biennial in Berlin. I will also be facilitating a show by another artist at the Five Years collective in London in November, and more projects are taking form, collaboratively and not.
Heyse Ip: Besides Berlin, I am currently developing a collaborative project in Hong Kong, working with the historic ephemera of the old fishing village area of Aberdeen, focusing on historical footage and sounds from the area.
| Sara Oberthaler
BIOS
Heyse Ip
is a multidisciplinary artist that works across moving-image, sculpture, performance and sound. His current works focus on the overlap of nature and human technology. Offering alternative narratives by giving voice to the animal or inanimate, he points out the absurdity and humour that exist within these intersectional spaces. By doing so he raises questions about our own definitions of humanness.
Ip holds an MA from the Royal College of Arts, UK and a BA from Chelsea College of Arts, UK. His work has been exhibited internationally including a solo exhibition in Hong Kong, and group exhibitions in the UK, USA, Austria, Greece as well as virtual exhibitions. As a member of the Five Years artist collective, he also co-curates a non-profit space in London.
regiment
is an artist working in sound, installation and performance. Coming from a background and experience of collectives in theatre and live art, regiment’s practice is often collaborative. Their ongoing research seeks to engage with the event and the exhibition as a medium, and aims at approaching the confluence of the sonic, interactive and performative to explore the possibility of a ‚performance without performers‘.
regiment holds a MA (Contemporary Art Practice) from the Royal College of Art, UK and is part of Five Years, a London based artist-run organisation.
www.rgm-regiment.com / @rgm_regiment
medienfrische
At the interdisciplinary art festival medienfrische, media art and secluded village life meet in the community of Pfafflar in Tyrol. The small and far-flung community of 90 souls is transformed by medienfrische into an experimental field in the midst of the high Alps. The focus is on contemporary developments in the media sector, the art world, science and the business sector. The quiet Bschlabertal is transformed into a place of work for 30 days.
komplex-KULTURMAGAZIN 