Leander Herzog – Sound object (data.matrix, Ryoji Ikeda), 2010
Laser cut plastic

The human ear perceives sound as an intangible presence, produced by vibrations travelling through a physical medium (air, water, even solids). Recorded sound is produced by measuring these vibrations for later reproduction by mechanical means. What we experience as harmony and rhythm appears to the computer as a one-dimensional number sequence.

Leander Herzog’s data sculptures perpetuate this disregard of the emotional dimension of music, looking at the sound input simply as a frozen space of random-access data. Herzog replicates this data stream by perforating plastic ribbons at intervals matching amplitude measurements, producing ornate collections of short and long loops. The result is a curious data artifact, numerically correct but completely disconnected from its own origin as sound.

This text is taken from the NODE10 catalogue, written by Eno Henze and Marius Watz and edited by Valérie-Françoise Vogt. Please read the introductory curator text for an overview of the exhibition topic.