conceptual art
Cornelia Sollfrank / 2015
This text discusses the claims of New-York-based artist Kenneth Goldsmith regarding his artistic strategies of writing poetry and building the online archive UbuWeb. It is based on an interview Sollfrank conducted with Goldsmith on 1st of February 2013.
Audio play, 37min, commissioned by ORF Radio, Vienna, 2004. Collaboration between Cornelia Sollfrank and Timothy Didymus, as part of the Kunstradio series „real audio literature – .ran 2“, curated by Johannes Auer. The radio play „Automatically Generated Authorship“ relates to the development of new forms of digital authorship in terms of both content and form. In the process, four different characters represent four different perspectives of the discourse around authorship. There is one male and one female computer voice each, as well as one male and one female human voice. The radio play, which is composed of spoken text, sounds and generative music, does not develop linearly, but results from permanent jumps on the time axis. And although certain content is predetermined by the authors (Sollfrank & Didymus), the final form is determined exclusively by the underlying software.
Conceptual Internet music project, Spatial installation / 2001
At the heart of Improved Television there is a composition by Arnold Schönberg: Verklärte Nacht. The piece has first been modified by Nam June Paik (1977) who slowed it down to 25% of its original speed, after which Dieter Roth accelerated Paik’s version up to the original speed and made it his own edition (1979). Cornelia Sollfrank continued the series of modifications by making the piece available to the online audience on a virtual record player where the user can set the speed themselves. The intervention also has an installation version where portraits of the four artists are presented next to their statements with a sound piece composed by Sollfrank on the basis of all previous interventions.
