He Told Me to Remain Silent
(Duo-Exhibiton)




Opening: Thu 09.07.2020 | 4:00-7:00 PM
Exhibition: 10 – 30.07.2020 | Tue - Sat 12:00 - 06:00 PM


Supported by:

In our last exhibition before the summer break we show art works by Dave Ball and Jörg Piringer. Both artists deal with the visualization of language. Jörg Piringer calls himself a "digital poet". He programs his computer to generate sound poems, to write independently and creatively. We have had him in our program since he won the ZKM App Art Award 2012. His exploration of language and poetry has now led him to be nominated for this year's Ingeborg Bachmann Prize.

Dave Ball, shortlisted for the Berlin Art Prize in 2016, has taken on an unimaginable performance project: he visualizes a myriad of words of the Concise English Oxford Dictionary according to rules he has established. We followed his path since he first joined the art residency program at Art Claims Impulse in 2008. In this exhibition, we show individual sequences of A, B, C and D.

Our curation shows two different positions (Jörg Piriniger: digital works, Dave Ball: drawings, illustrations and photos), thus creating a dialogue on the subject of language visualisation.

"He Told Me to Remain Silent" is our response to Wittgenstein's last sentence in his treaty "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent", which we question with the artworks by Dave Ball and Jörg Piringer, who both offer an open and individual interpretation of language.

partikel, by Jörg Piringer

partikel - an interactive immersive text-sound installation

partikel is a reflection on the attempts to establish pervasive voice control for devices and means of transport on a large scale. In contrast to so-called personal assistants such as Alexa or Siri, however, partikel is not concerned with subordinating one's own speech to the utilitarian computer system and its exploitation models and at the same time adapting one's own language to the machine, but rather with expanding the sound and speech possibilities of the voice and exploring new forms of expression. It is an interactive dynamic text-sound installation in which the audience control the visual and acoustic events through their voices. Everything reacts to each other: the sound influences the image and the image the sound. The audience can control the complex behaviour of the sounding letters with pitch, sound quality and volume of their voice and experiment with them with relish.

Short Bio


Dave Ball

A to Z

A to Z is an umbrella work comprising a series of successive semi-independent projects defined by a particular letter of the alphabet; each introduces some new conceptual parameter or media restriction, whilst adhering to the basic parameters of the overall work. The work originally developed out of an interest in utilising randomness as a generative tool, inspired in part by a well-known technique for encouraging lateral thinking, which is to pick a word at random in the dictionary and apply that to whatever subject-matter is being investigated – thus breaking out of the constraints of conventionally linear, logical thought. A to Z deliberately pushes the rationale behind this technique to an absurd level, where there is nothing left except the non-linear thought; divorced of any context, the efficacy of the operation is called into question. What remains is a farcically large collection of sequential images, whose meaningfulness is undermined by the excessive faith in semiotic cogency that drives the project’s relentless marrying of words and images.

A to Z Letter C, by Dave Ball

Short Bio

Exhibition: 10 - 30.07.2020