KLANGSPUREN - THE LICHTENBERG FIGURES
When electricity discharges at high voltage on or in an insulating material, something fascinating happens: As if by magic, tree-like patterns with tiny ramifications appear, similar to the shape of a lightning bolt extending in many directions. The German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg created such a figure for the first time, on a charged insulator plate covered in dust. "Among other things, I produced a lot of concentric circles with a single stroke," he wrote in a letter about his discovery. "Of course, it's a game, but it's such a beautiful, instructive game that I will never be ashamed of it." There are now companies that burn Lichtenberg figures onto wood and sell the drawn objects for a lot of money. With Eva Reiter's work four years ago, the lightning bolt that had become visible and was forever immortalised on a material also found its way to sound: a series of seven titles for voice and ensemble and six instrumental interludes preceded by a prologue. In her work, Reiter repeatedly deals with scientific events and circumstances and transfers her examination of these to other contexts. For her, The Lichtenberg Figures is therefore a "sonic psychogram of a society", as she herself writes: "We are repeatedly immersed in mirrored, distorted, broken soundscapes in which the listener is dazzled by illusions and hallucinatory sounds." Like a text, the metaphor-rich world of this work "can be understood as a kind of personal coordinate system, an open reference system of the listener's own identity." (HS)
