Bernhard Lang
Loop-Space/ Space Loop

A first try at a differentiation of terms:

• Musical Space as Sound/Harmony: Space as a synchronous Time-point
• Musical Space as a Time-Line
• Musical Space as defined/becoming accessible by movement, as a difference in space and time

• Space as an exterior spatial extension
• Space as an abstact extension (e.g. as an temporal extension, as a frequency extension, a density extension)
• Space as an interior/psychoplogical field of perception.

During the last years I have concentrated on working with loops, which means both audio and video-loops.

The loop as a repetition structure became the starting point for a new kind of "loop aesthetics" and led to a series of pieces, called the Difference/Repetition-series.

These pieces involve concert situations, installations and visual work.

At a very early stage of development the term space turned out to be a crucial one for the pieces. The reason for this seems rather complex at the first look:

When trying to define a loop one comes down to the concept of movement, namely from a starting point A towards an endpoint B, which is being repeated all over. A loop means traversing a time-space repeatedly.

Since my piece DW2 I started to project this Loop -Space into actual space, adding a synchronous spatialisation to the loop-inherent movement, making the loops wander in space and time synchronously, thereby creating Space-Loops.

In the later pieces of the series, mainly in #4, #6 and #7 and #10 I have used the loop generator to generate different kind of repetitions and to generate the necessary spaciousness, creating thus analogue movements in exterior space and Loop-space.

In this workshop I'll try to demonstrate this by a performance of Difference/Repetition #7 for Eviola/Eviolin and loop-generator. This piece consists mainly of loops, both loops generated by the player and the gestures involved in his playing, and by loops generated by computer.

This piece will also be the starting point of work, giving first material for possible co-operations with dancers, musicians, video-artists and others.

My interest lies in different kind of projections/mappings of the inherent musical gestures onto bodily movements, onto visual loops and projections.

Since I have been trying to explore Loop-Space also within different improvise contexts during the last year, I also will offer a cut-up of the piece (about 40 chunks/samples) for further experimentation/improvisation.

I'll bring along the replikator#16, a special software for improvising with loops.

I'll try to give some short lectures beside our main work of development, on following issues:

1. The Loop as a repetitive Structure in music. (The DW series)
2. The Loop within the visual work of Martin Arnold
3. The philosophical background of using differentiated repetitive structures (Deleuze)
4. Body Movement/Eye Movement: The phenomenological study of repeated movement as a mapping structure between visual and auditive signals. The Problem of synchronicity.
5. The repetition of gestures: the collaboration with Xavier Le Roy on the Theater of Repetitions (DW5)
6. Puppet Studies: the work of Stephen Mottram.

Bernhard Lang, 2003