That's what the German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck will do Saturday 5 December at 18.45 at the Opificio Golinelli in Bologna (via Paolo Nanni Costa 14), citadel for the knowledge and culture of Bologna wanted by the Golinelli Foundation. For the first time in Emilia-Romagna he will present the seven tracks of his wooden vinyls, collected in the album Years, in a DJ set that will alternate between music and science.
The twenty-eight year old from Munich, active in Europe and beyond, is exploring the relationships between sounds with his performances, generating musical installations that live and grow beyond his hand. Thus the artist has created an instrument capable of reading the circles of a tree and associating them with the sounds of a piano, leaving the machine to the task of interpreting the trees and originating sounds and atmospheres. Inspired by the cover of an album by the American group Jurassic 5, where a record player needle rested on top of a log, Traubeck replaced the needle with a micro camera and an LED light that read the image of the growth rings, the distance, the thickness, the grain. A program interprets the data and associates it with a piano scale, bringing the music to life. Spruce, ash, oak, maple, alder, walnut and beech, each tree has its own shape, its imprint on the record, its years. Years it collects the sound of the seven trees and also captures their elapsed time, in the growth of its rings. Bartholomäus Traubeck will not only play his tracks but will show the genesis of the work in a concert-performance.
“I have always been fascinated by the visual representation of the passing of time – explains Bartholomäus Traubeck. Tree rings are picture perfect: one year, one ring. Imagining that years and years of a tree are compressed into such small discs was a great artistic and musical inspiration”.
The German DJ's concert is part of the National Tree Day celebrations. At the Opificio, from 17 to 18.30 pm, there will also be a workshop for children aged 6 to 13 to learn more about the history of trees and to decorate them in anticipation of Christmas.
Biography
Bartholomäus Traubeck, born in Munich in 1987, is a media and sound artist and lives and works between Vienna and Munich. She studied MultimediaArt in Salzburg and Visual Communication at the Arts University of Linz. You have received numerous awards, including the Media Art Award in Salzburg, an honorable mention for digital music and sound art from Ars Electronica and the Special Prize of the Autonomous Province of Bozen-Bolzano 2012 (KunstArt Award). Her works are exhibited internationally, in museums and institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts, the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and Merano Arte.
The disc
“Years” is a modified turntable that generates music from the growth rings of a tree. It is a semi-interactive work that can be used much like a record player. Instead of a needle, it uses a microscopic lens chamber that scans the surface of a wooden record, while the record player arm slowly moves inward across the cross section. The circles are analyzed for thickness, solidity and growth rate. To translate everything into music, the data is mapped to a scale of notes played by a piano, whose samples are played based on the input data. The music arises from the program's set of rules, but the set of rules is interpreted differently for each tree. A fast grown spruce with plenty of space between the rings will have a more minimalistic and calm sound than an ash, which has a complex and thinly woven cross section, resulting in a loud and eclectic composition. It's a car man-made designed to make sense of a natural pattern. Through “Years” the time it took for the tree to grow is condensed into a small piece of music. By comparing it with a vinyl record, the difference between time as an objective quantity and as lived time (or as an experience of time) is made perceptible.
