The artist’s field of work at all times reflects the prevailing social and technological circumstances. Due to the explosive development and availability of new technologies and information structures the creative field of the composer is also changing: a time of great upheaval is emerging.

This change will be demonstrated through some specific examples based on my own compositional work. They illuminate examples of an extended field of work, which seeks to distance itself from the much invoked “ivory tower”.

Documentation / Communication

The documentation of the current state of the artistic work and the analysis of it on a Website mutates the hermetic process of composition “in splendid isolation” into a transparent process visible to all.

The page design language HTML, the basis of the World-Wide Web, makes it possible to link documents to one another through references (‘links’). This enables a multi-dimensional form of information networking, which can be changed and extended at any time. The rigid corpus of the text, once codified in print and afterwards no longer changeable, thereby becomes fluid. Thanks to hyperlinks, it may reach out beyond its own limitations, not just to other texts (such as commentaries, supplements, critiques, analyses, thesauri etc.) but also to images and sounds. This makes it possible to use multimedia to document complex projects from their starting point, such as the work-in-progress fLOW (1998/99):

This is a performance project based on a real-time sound installation to which you can listen on the attached CD. It had numerous performances between 1998 and 1999, in the most diverse locations (museum, gallery, concert hall, bar, radio station, swimming pool, church) with various musicians from the areas of new music, free improvisation, jazz, rock, and electronic music. All performances were specially conceived for the respective location with its inherent socio-cultural contexts, and often arose out of an Internet discussion with the participating musicians. The respective stage of the project can be read in the WWW and serves as a presentation of the status quo not only for the artists who are working on it together, but also for interested members of the public.