Florian Hecker is an artist who explores the sensual and psychological side of the listening process. FAVN is a distillation of that exploration, with almost a decade of shapeshifting history, from its early imaginings in 2016 at Alte Oper, Frankfurt, to the exhibition Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese in 2017 at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and a forthcoming reimagining for Terraforma in Milan on 28 June.
FAVN is described as an “automated performance tracing the blurry boundaries between reality and imagination, sensory perception and hallucination”. 19th century conceits are everywhere, from the emergence of psychophysics, to the Stéphane Mallarmé poem ‘L’après-midi d’un faun’ to Debussy’s ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’, and even to where FAVN will take place – Palazzina Appiani in Milan, a neoclassical building designed by architect Luigi Canonica in the early 19th century.
Ahead of the Terraforma show on June 28, we caught up with Hecker to discuss the history and inner workings of the project.
FAVN has enjoyed a long life in different spaces. Is part of your practice about reimagining it in different spaces?
FH: Many topics are not less relevant than when I started working on the project 10 years ago – the ongoing quantification of sensation, the resistances to such quantification efforts through timbre synthesis, the constellation of text and sound.
This project has a fleck of continuity about it – because while conditions might change, the central question remains.
FH: It’s certainly unresolved for me. The sonic that evades linguistic description, the unnamable, the non-categories, the “psycho acousticians’ multi-dimensional waste basket”, as Albert Bregman and Steve McAdams put it.
One of the foundation stones for FAVN is Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem ‘L’après-midi d’un faun’, a landmark in French literature and symbolism, where did you first come across it?
FH: I was confronted with it through the context of when the piece was first commissioned – the Alte Oper in Frankfurt at the time, had a festival dedicated to Debussy’s ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faun’.
Debussy speaks to the cyclical nature of creativity, since he composed ‘Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune’ in 1894 as a kind of response to Mallarmé’s poem. Both of these pieces of work are firmly rooted in the 19th century, and take this idea of a dreamlike state as inspiration. How far is the 19th century another factor here ?
FH: Seeing the encounter with synthetic sound as a quasi-hallucinatory experience has been on my mind since long. [The 19th century] is the point of origin for psychophysics and, more particularly, psychoacoustics, an area of work touched upon on many occasions since 2004, and even so for synthesis more generally, as in chemistry, an aspect that – and again related to FAVN – became a thread in the project Resynthesizers With Equitable Vitrines at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles in 2021.
FAVN has come around again at a particularly strange time, with the proliferation of the internet married to a feeling of disconnection.
FH: All of these features pluri-phonic sound pieces may offer: the demand for one’s attention and time is returned in psycho-physical alienation and the encounter with something rich and strange.
Your work is also very interested in the emergence of psychophysics in the 19th century – that relationship between physical stimuli and human perception. The work of Weber and Fechner come to mind, how does that fold in to FAVN?
FH: FAVN navigates from timbral synthesis based on a Scattering Transform with wavelets to a movement that features an adaptation of Xenakis’s ‘sieve’ method onto its final movement that becomes an internal affair increasingly when all frequencies shift towards registers that evoke Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions. The relation to the domains of audiology and psychoacoustics is present in the material yet may be less transparent than in earlier projects such as the exhibition Event, Stream, And Object (MMK Frankfurt, 2010).
Encounters with synthetic sound as a quasi-hallucinatory experience has been a touchstone for you, how has your interest evolved?
FH: The terminology of the synthetic emerged in a conversation with Reza Negarestani when we began working on the Chimerization project in 2011. Still, wording aside, I’ve been drawn to synthesised sound as far back as I can remember. The strange and hard-to-pin-down bits in pop songs that I encountered as a child while listening to the radio in the 1980s, generated with synthesisers rather than instruments being – or stemming from – acoustic tools. More or less all of my works, up to 2010, embraced the concept of synthesis, with no ‘external’ sounds involved; everything comes from the algorithms employed as directly as possible. With 2012’s Chimerization or Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera or Bregman / Deutsch Chimaera – 47 minutes in bifurcated attention, both in 2011, and other works around the concept of the Auditory Chimera marked a detour from this, focusing on the notion of analysis and resynthesis, which is central to FAVN and moreso to Resynthese FAVN – 2017-2024.
With this particular event as part of Terraforma at the majestic Palazzina Appiani, how far has the space informed the process?
FH: Not at all. FAVN has its parameters in terms of the technology used for its staging, loudspeakers, props, etc., but the audio content remains fixed.
As human beings, we often seek resolution in many ways, but is this project partly about dwelling in ambiguity? We seek to identify the source of certain sounds, yet the very nature of it is ephemeral.
FH: Yes.
Is this also about giving into a kind of deep listening and being willing to be disoriented?
FH: I would not want FAVN or any other work to be associated with a particular mode of listening; anyway, this labour is happening on the side of the audience. A certain dose of alienation is more tempting. What are these encounters with such sonic material? Herbert Brün’s collected writings have the beautiful title When Music Resists Meaning…
How far is timbre a touchstone for you? Timbre is something that cannot neatly be described, as it comes in so many forms, as an overtone, or the weird way a trombone sound might hit…
FH: In the late 1990s, Zbigniew Karkowski called my music ‘pure timbre’ in a conversation we had; I didn’t make much of his comment back then, seeing – equipped with a good dose of scepticism towards categories – units such as rhythm and pitch things to avoid. Only after getting into psychoacoustics from the mid-2000s onward and understanding what a strange force of resistance timbre embodies, I became more curious. Additionally, as I began working with tools originating from audiology and psychoacoustics, which were initially conceived for analysis of sound and which I inverted into means for synthesis, the notion of timbre and attempts to capture it emerged more regularly.
Synthesis became an industrial and aesthetic phenomenon in the late 19th century, but seems so resonant today. What are your thoughts?
FH: There are several tracks from which this terminology finds its way more and more into the everyday, resonating with artificial means for production across all scales – some years ago, I came across this advert. I believe it was from the 1870s that announced newly developed artificial fragrance chemical components. It said something like ‘At least, synthetic scents!’ – almost euphoric, meaning that there must have been a different appreciation of the synthetic than it occupied for long in the late 20th century, where the artificial often was seen as inferior, inauthentic, etc.
Is FAVN something that can essentially continue on? It seems that the abstraction can keep going, and there are limitless possibilities for resynthesising.
FH: The notion of differences interests me, so what are the new sonic characteristics that are being introduced in the process of analysis and resynthesis? These are materialised in the form of remnants, by-products of the iterative nature of machine listening systems at work. It also gives an insight into computational time, as Vincent Lostanlen mentioned. The first movement of FAVN is that. In Resynthese FAVN, with its distinct computational protocol, the character of these remnants is also highly different from other related projects, such as the exhibitions Resynthesizers (2021) and TEMPLEXTURE (2022), which continue this trend, even if the forms are very different.
Each individual listener brings their own set of values, desires, and thoughts to this project – that must be quite a satisfying component for you.
FH: Very much so.
Can you recall anyone ever having a surprising encounter with FAVN in the past, in the way they encountered a different kind of listening?
You must speak to Michael Newman; I believe he listened to all versions of Resynthese FAVN when it was first shown in Vienna. Synthetic timbre might open different perspectives on sound, music and memory. With that particular project, its duration and scale, the question arises: have I heard this already? Is it the same? What do I remember, etc.…
Florian Hecker performs FAVN as part of this year’s Terraforma Exo in Milan, which will take place from June 28 to 29, 2025. Find more information here.
