Erasing Audio with Christoph Korn

On a symposium about experimental radio art in June 2008, I learned about the conceptual work of german artist Christoph Korn. Since three years he deals with automated audio erasing processes. He presented one piece that was later broadcasted that year on the German radiostation HR3 and is actually a reverse version of Alvin Lucier’s “I’m sitting in a room”. Instead of replaying the audio into the room again, Korn wrote a patch for MAX/MSP which automatically erases fragments of audio with every repetition from a spoken text quite similar to Lucier’s classic piece. After about 15 min. there is no audio anymore, the piece ends in silence. A similar concept, only over a much longer time period, was persued in his piece “waldstueck” that is based on a 24-hour field recording of a forest section close to Dachau, a former nazi concentration camp. The audio recording has been transferred to a web server and will be successively deleted, randomly and automatically, over a period of three years. The deletion process began on February 5, 2008 and within three years there will be nothing to be heard. A protocol of disappearance, one might say, over the impossibility either to say, or not to say anything about or around Dachau.