Florian Hecker: Resynthese FAVN

Resynthese FAVN is a ten-CD box set and publication presenting a new realization of Florian Hecker’s 2017 thirteen-channel installation of the same name. First exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien in the exhibition “Halluzination, Perspektive, Synthese,” and elaborating upon ideas first presented in the 2016 project FAVN, the ten works that comprise Resynthese FAVN present iterations of synthetic timbre produced using “…spectral operators, moving between analysis and synthesis, between discriminative and generative models, in order to render audible their intelligence signature, the signal trace of their nonhuman brain-ear”—a sonification of a machine caught in the act of listening to itself. Accompanying the audio are three booklets containing three new essays offering critical and historical context for the work, developed in collaboration with the British publisher Urbanomic. 

FAVN and its resynthesis point back to Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1876 poem “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun,” and its subsequent musical and choreographic interpretations by Claude Debussy and Vaslav Nijinsky. A faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion; asks the faun, “Did I love a dream?” Hecker, in turn, asks listeners to examine their own sensory perceptions. What forms do our human minds make out of the algorithmic timbres and synthetic voices that unspool across the versions of Resynthese FAVN? Sound drags, ascends, chirps, warps, and growls between manic irregularity and formal logic. Definite but indescribable differences emerge across the ten 53-minute pieces. Language—occasionally emerging through a synthetic voice, sourced from a libretto written by Robin Mackay—proves unstable within the hallucinatory textures set loose by Hecker’s composition. As chimeric shapes materialize and fade away, one might further ask: are we listening for the faun, or do we become faun through listening? 

Across the three newly published essays, Quentin Meillassoux contextualizes the character of the faun in Mallarmé’s poem; Noé Soulier assesses the embodied translation of “L’Après-Midi d’un Faun” in Nijinsky’s 1912 ballet; and Han Han and Vincent Lostanlen consider the trajectory of timbre, from the enlightenment to our computational present. 

Florian Hecker is a German artist whose works across synthetic sound, installation, and performance consider sensory perception and the audience's auditory experience. He has collaborated with artists and authors including Aphex Twin, Cerith Wyn Evans, Russell Haswell, Mark Leckey, Robin Mackay, Reza Negarestani, and Yasunao Tone.