Iris ter Schiphorst

Transformationen (2021)

on the 'Transformations' series I - IV from 2021 onwards

In 'Transformations' several layers of time and media are superimposed:

the music playback is based on an old recording of a piece from 1989 (recorded at the time by violinist Susanne Schulz and myself on the synthesiser/sampler), which has now been edited and reassembled for the 'Transformations' series. The basis for the piece at that time was, among other things, field recordings of frogs that I had recorded in the 1980s with a Sony Professional at a watering hole in Spain and then edited in a Casio sampler (with 1MB storage capacity!). (Today this waterhole and the frogs no longer exist there - and the Casio-FZ1 sampler is now only used as a term in stories about the beginnings of sampler technology).
The voiceover is a recording of a voice from March 2022 reading the text of the above-mentioned poem.
The live musicians add another dimension of time and space.

In the 'real time' of the performance, different layers of time and space intermingle: 'archaeological' sounds from the feed, an acousmatic voice and the 'live' sound of the string duo.

In a way, this approach echoes the title and content of the poem 'Diepe tijd' (deep time) by Flemish writer Dominique de Groen. The term was introduced by the writer John McPhee in 1980/81 to describe a time dimension of millions or even billions of years, which does justice to the slow evolutionary processes on earth - and for which human consciousness is not comprehensible.

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