ARKollective
Team
Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt & Malte Pelleter
Audio production: Sebastian Kunas
Speaker: Sarah-Indriyati Hardjowirogo
ARK (Arkestrated Rhythmachine Komplexities), Installation with 10 rhythm machines, 3 samplers, headphones and multichannel audio
Courtesy the artists
Arkestrated Rhythmachine Komplexities
ARK (Arkestrated Rhythmachine Komplexities) is a truth-pattern generator. The installation brings together various rhythm machines from the 1950s to the 1980s though doesn’t supply any museum-style master narrative along with them. Cultural analysis and technical-historical categories are kept as far away as possible. The Arkestra bends linear chronologies. Without so much as a whisper from object cards, a semantic thicket is already tangled across the surface of the machines: genre-classifications, world maps, affective orderings….
Rhythm machines are the primary experimental apparatuses of sonic (de-)linking, by means of which territorial attributions are fictionalized sonically, dissolved, but also fortified again and again. ARK doesn’t seek to dissolve the manifold complexities and contradictions that surround these machines but rather to let them—like the devices themselves—keep running. Rhythmization enables the interplay of semantic disparities. Counter-rhythms, not contradiction. The track as itinerary and not as originality. The discursive truth function becoming a rhythm pattern. Formalized funkologics.
* ARKollective is a changing association of musicians, producers, writers, scientists and electronic MusickingThings, who*which perform heterochronicity and multi-track knowledge.