friday 5 april – opening 10 pm. follows 24/24
saturday 6 april – open all day 24/24
sunday 7 april – open all day 24/24. closing 00:00 am
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friday 12 april – opening 10 pm. follows 24/24
saturday 13 april – open all day 24/24
sunday 14 april – open all day 24/24. closing 00:00 am
Palazzo Volpe
Catherine Christer Hennix (S)
Soliton(e) Star / Zero-Time
perceptual environment, italian première
Soliton(e) Star / Zero-Time is a perceptual environment implemented for Live Arts Week, a monochromatic sound room open night and day, in which a mind-altering effect is sought like in a dream house. Through a complex communion of mathematics and meditation, neurophysiology, quantum theories and concept art, philosophy and tuning systems, the drone pioneer Catherine Christer Hennix presents a sample of her infinitary composition, assigning equal significance to any point of its continuum sound. “Yet, there is no record of a known grammar governing disembodied sound wave maps which weave themselves tracelessly through time and space, like a semantical foam waiting to be deciphered.”
A shortened version of Soliton(e) Star / Zero-Time was performed together with the computer animation NUR (for Marian Zazeela) for the first time at a celebration of La Monte Young’s 71st birthday at the Diapasion Gallery, New York City, 2005. Its longest installation was in 2018 at the Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, China.
Catherine Christer Hennix is a swedish artist, poet, composer and philosopher with a strong interest in logic and formal music theory, pioneer of the exploration of drone music and the meditative, trance-like state it induces. She started her creative career playing drums with her older brother Peter growing up in Sweden where she saw jazz luminaries such as John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor perform at the Golden Circle. Directly after high school, Hennix went to work at Stockholm’s pioneering Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), where she helped develop early synthesizer and tape music. After traveling to New York In 1968, she met Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles and developed fruitful collaborative relationships with many composers in the burgeoning American avant-garde, including, most significantly, Henry Flynt and La Monte Young. Young introduced Hennix to Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath, and she would later study intensively under him. While Hennix continued to make music performing alongside Arthur Russell, Marc Johnson, Henry Flynt, and Arthur Rhames, she also served as a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at SUNY New Paltz and as a visiting Professor of Logic (at Marvin Minsky’s invitation) at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In recent years Hennix has led the just-intonation ensemble the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. In 2018 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presented Catherine Christer Hennix: Traversée du Fantasme, the first museum solo exhibition in over 40 years. A two-volume collection of her writing as well as a series of archival recorded releases is forthcoming through Blank Forms Editions. She currently resides in Berlin, where she is active as a composer and writer.
digital infinitary composition, 2003, Amsterdam