Christian Terstegge *1958 (Bielefeld)

exhibitions / performances (selection)
Ressource Kunst (Berlin, Saarbrücken, Munich, Budapest 1989); Zufall als Prinzip (Ludwigshafen 1992), Kunst kommt von Gießen (Lindinger + Schmid, Regensburg 1993); Radioaktivitäten (Kehdingen 1993); Pfeifen im Walde (International music-festival Luzern, 1997); EMITTIME - ein palindromisches Festival (Bern 2002)

Radio - Active (1992)
(24 household sponges with integrated VHF-radios)

To absorb and to give out are the two basic features of a sponge. Due to these rather mediating characteristics, the sponge is a fascinating metaphor for receiving and transmitting and therefore predestined as material of an audio-visual installation. The work 'radio-active' consists of various radio-receivers hidden in oversized household-sponges. Unlike standard radios, the receiving frequencies can't be manually selected: electronically generated random seeds determine the frequencies. What can be heard is therefore short fragments of ongoing VHF programs as well as the noise in-between. The random generators determine different sequences of frequencies for every receiver, making of the installation an turbulent mixture of language-, sound- and music-fragments representing the innumerable information invisibly present around us all the time. What can be heard is similar to the sensation of continuously seeking programs. Every radio is roaming within the frequencies of the VHF-sector, blazing a trail trough the jungle of programs. Once it switches abruptly to a new frequency, the next time it flashes by different frequencies without stopping or takes it's time to enter slowly the frequency of a program, stopping for a while before leaving it again.