Copula E (Sprachlabor) , Laboratory of Language
In addition to the reading of the voice as an aesthetic sound phenomenon or as a vehicle of linguistic meaning, there is another: it is neither language nor body, it forms another space at its point of contact. The voice is a remnant, an object that forces thinking.
On this basis, COPULA E attempts to take literally and translate back into sound considerations on the (keno)grammar andmetaphysics of confusion, on the politics of the voice, and on phonology. Art voices and programming languages form thebasis for this.
COMMENT „The following programme will „not begin with the simple and simplest, only to then ascend step by step to the complex, and again and again experience that this complex is reducible at any time, albeit not always easily, to the simple with which we have made our beginning“. „I propose,“ Rudolf Kaehr continues at the beginning of his „Sketches of a fabric of calculating spaces in thinking emptiness“, „to begin directly with the complex. This implies a decision for thinking and fundamentally differentiates itself from the primacy of perception as the basis of evidence. Thinking and not perception should be the guiding principle.
This beginning is therefore not only unimaginable, it also contradicts all the rules of the identity and its logic founded in the view. Nor does it begin with chaos or any other disorder. In the beginning there is neither being nor nothingness. There is therefore no beginning with which to begin. In the beginning, Kaehr continues, there is neither space nor time. In the beginning there is nothing and this nothing is not a beginning. Thus there is also no origin as beginning; there are multiplicities of beginning. And beginnings as vileities; multiplicities as beginnings. And neither the one nor the other. And neither and nor or not yet.
Kaehr, he writes, begins „with unidentifiable objects of thinking, objects of thinking which cannot be brought to evidence in any perception“. Thus any identical inscription, inscrip- tion, inscription, foundation in a semiotic is also excluded. For signs are identical nota- tions, substitutes for something, for someone as an instance. Paradoxically, it will turn out that this „transclassical beginning“, as Kaehr calls it, is viewed categorically, decisively simpler than the classical one, insofar as it itself rejects the fundamental categories of the classical definition of the calculable, space and time.
These objects of thought or subjects of thought are not parts of an inaccessible spiritua- lity. On the contrary, they should lead the way to the design of new transclassical ma- chines and their understanding. Since, according to Kaehr, in logocentrism there is one and only one sign economy, or only one is assumed, and any multiplicity of the semiotic is traced back to it via isomorphic formation, this one and only one place of semiosis can also be displaced without particular danger. Therefore it is not thematized in semiotics and appears only in transcendental semiotic reflections, which, however, are not percei- ved by the theory of formal and programming languages.
The abstraction of identifiability is the presemiotic prerequisite of the recognizability of a sign. In order to perceive or recognize a sign as a sign, it must be separable. It must be able to stand out from its background and be distinguishable from its environment. However, for a sign to be separable, it must be identifiable. It must be identifiable as a sign. Identifiability and separability are the conditions for the possibility of signs. Both, however, condition each other and thus form a circular structure. Signs are defined circularly and their introduction is antinomic. This circularity can only be avoided if a general context is assigned to this process as prior knowledge. However, if one wanted to explicate this prior knowledge or the context of identification and separation itself, circularity would be reinstalled. The abstraction of the identifiability of signs thus has a genuinely antinomic structure. „In order to be able to repeat a sign, it must be recognizable, i.e. identifiable and separable. Iterability presupposes recognisability. However, a sign is not recogniz- able if it is not repeatable. The abstractions of identifiability and iterability disregard their antinomic structure and thus establish semiotics as a contradiction-free theory of sign economy.
A single sign on a sheet of paper is a sign occurrence because of its concrete existence. In order for two occurrences of the same sign to be recognized as equal, an abstraction must be carried out. The occurence of the sign is a representative of its sign.
Commentators: Angelica Avenel, Edda Fischer
Composition: Marcus Schmickler
Sonification: Julian Rohrhuber
Soprano : Judith Hofmann
Saxophone: Hayden Chisholm
Comissioned by WDR3 Studio Akustische Kunst 2014
5.1 channel audio.
Duration ~52 minutes. Premiere: 12.12.2014