In May 2015, Lydgalleriet presents two works by Erik Bünger: A lecture on Schizophonia, a video installation and a performance lecture titled The girl who never was. The videoinstallation A lecture on Schizophonia explores a rupture in our experience of the human voice that follows from the invention of audio-communication technologies in the 19th century. This rupture is termed schizophonia: ”That which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned”. A voice can issue suddenly from nowhere, from the wrong mouth or even from beyond the grave.
On May 13th, Bünger delivers the performance lecture The girl who never was. The lecture traces a historical thread from 2008 where an American researcher rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the 148-year-old voice of a little girl singing the French lullaby ‘Au Clair de la Lune’. A year later another researcher experiments with the playback speed and manages to prove that the fragment actually contains the voice of a full-grown man.
Bünger’s lecture investigates the strange presence of the non-existent girl and explores how a particular insistency, pertaining to the voice alone, makes it the vehicle for certain kinds of inexistencies, as they make their way into our world. The more we try to shut her voice out, the more persistent her song becomes.
Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and writer living in Berlin. He has a background studying literature and electronic music composition. His work takes the form of video-installations or performance lectures. This project is presented at Lydgalleriet in collaboration with our guest curator Rune Søchting.
Photo: Erik Bünger.