Exhibition STALKER 2 @ Böse Musik Festival, HKW Berlin 2013

Dates for the Exhibition: 24 - 27 of October 2013, opening on 24 October at 7.30pm
Place: House of World Cultures, Berlin
Panel on the theme of ‘Evil Music’: In addition, I will take part in a panel together with Steve Goodman (author of ‘Sonic Warfare’, musician) and moderator Holger Schulze on Saturday 26th of October at 7pm at House of World Cultures, Berlin.

‘Stalker 1’ is a collection of Youtube-videos and documents the application of ultrasonic (hypersonic) loud-speakers in public space. Therefore a smaller ultrasonic loudspeakers is used. The speakers’ extremely vectored output – namely at a radiation angle of three degrees – is compared often to a pocket lamp’s light cone. With the aid of hypersonic speakers it is possible, even over a considerable distance, to expose target individuals or small groups of people to an onslaught of sound. Prolonged exposure to these Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) can cause nausea, severe headaches and disorientation yet they are considered still as non-lethal weapons. Both the military and the police deploy hypersonic speakers internationally as a means of crowd control, for example in Senegal in January 2012 and at the Anti-G20 protests in Pittsburgh in 2009. A police officer quoted by The Washington Times said, ‘[An LRAD] is designed to get people to do what police want. It makes them uncomfortable but does not hurt them’.

The sound installation ‘Stalker 2’ is an unknown auditive zone in the entrance area of the House of World Cultures in Berlin. “… what it was? The fall of a meteorite? The visit of inhabitants of the human cosmos? We directly sended troops there. They did not come back … for the rest – I don´t know, I don´t know … From an interview with the Nobel prize winner professor Wallace with a correspondent of the RAI” (in 'Stalker' by Andrej Tarkovsky). Seven years later the catastrophe of Tschernobyl represented a dramatic analogy to this fiction. The whole surrounding became depopulated (officially called 'zone of alienation'). Some of the workers, who took care of the abandoned power station called themselves 'stalkers'. At the House of World Cultures an ultrasonic sound beam creates an unknown auditive ‘zone’. For that matter a kinetically moved, large parabolic mirror (that reminds on radar units, oldschool and science fiction at the same time) is transformed into a reflector; it becomes a voice.

concept/realisation/composition: Anke Eckardt
thanks to: Marcus Schmickler, Ausstellungsmanufaktur
financed by the House of World Cultures, Berlin