Lecture performance: A Lecture on Schizophonia
Erik Bünger's audiovisual performance lecture uses excerpts from Woody Allen-films, songs by Nat King Cole and speeches by Barack Obama to draw attention to the disjunction between image and sound. Footage from the film "The Exorcist" is combined with biblical quotations to explore the intertwining of voice and soul. Has technology conquered death when a deceased person’s speech can be electronically reproduced? Suddenly a voice can come from nowhere, from the wrong mouth or from beyond the grave. From the very first recording of a human voice to the answering machine message, Bünger explores ownership and possession, reality and illusion, and the presence of the "body" of a voice. While speaking he simultaneously uses the very effects he analyses to explore the nervous breakdown that occurs when the voice is separated from its source.
Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and author, whose work explores the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the human body. His performances, video installations and compositions have been presented in venues such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Lincoln Center in New York, KW in Berlin, ACCA in Melbourne, The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil and the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. He currently holds a four-year research fellowship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he leads a group of artists in an investigation of the concept of 'voice-over'. In 2022 he curated the Impakt Festival in Utrecht together with Florian Wüst.
Film screening: The Third Man
The Third Man (2010) presents an alternative theory about the origin of song: music as a parasite that infects humanity at some point in prehistory and then spreads like ripples from body to body. Some researchers propose that song may constitute the very first technology in the history of humanity; a way to control the emotions and movements of other beings before words and weapons. Song is also the first technology, that each individual encounters in life - it works its way into the womb before any other conditioning of the child can take place.
Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and author, whose work explores the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the human body. His performances, video installations and compositions have been presented in venues such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Lincoln Center in New York, KW in Berlin, ACCA in Melbourne, The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil and the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. He currently holds a four-year research fellowship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he leads a group of artists in an investigation of the concept of 'voice-over'. In 2022 he curated the Impakt Festival in Utrecht together with Florian Wüst.
