works
2021
FINSTER (- Dark [German] - syn.: sinister, gloomy, obfuscated) is a site specific installation transforming
one of the cells in the old PBC for Uncloud 2021 into a multi sensory spatial scene. It combines subjects of architecture, culture and perception.
The work embeds all surfaces of the cell in black fabric, creating a second skin, a delusive cover, which leaves the visual subordinate to olfactory, tactile and sonic stimuli.
FINSTER draws parallels to spaces which seem the farthest away from our current possibilities of unforeseen encounters - with others or oneself - where the unknown (also) makes space for excitement and freedom. The installation aims to counteract the obvious prison cell, seeking to evoke feelings of insideness and otherness and offers a place to dwell in.
“ (...) De Duitse kunstenaar Alexander Köppel bijvoorbeeld bekleedde de binnenruimte van een kleine cel met een zelf gebrouwen, glitzwarte substantie. Wie sich kort laat insluiten in de ruimte ervaart een intense, audiovisueele leegte en een soort isolatie in het kwadraat. (...)”
Robert van Gijssel, De Volkskrant, 03.11.2021
Listen to an excerpt of FINSTER here
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FINSTER was created in residency at Uncloud Festival 2021, titled Transliminal. Many thanks to the whole Uncloud team for their support and the almost carte blanche for this project to emerge.
Image: Ira Grünberger
SONDER
2023 - in process
Sonder is an audience composable installation-performance with manifold possibilities. 40 lenses come together in a curved installation, breaking different kinds of light in spectacular ways onto the audience. Accompanied by a paired score borrowing from field recording, techno and noise, the piece is played
almost as an instrument, apparatus, a sculpture come alive.
The work explores individualism and collectiveness;
it spans a dynamic range which gives time and care to small details as well as overwhelming gestures.
The audience is invited into states of introspection, wondering, chrysalism and a sense of sonder.
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SONDER is a first collaborative piece by the artist group MIA (Maarten Keus, Inga Hirsch and Alexander Köppel).
Orginally created for Traumburg festival 2023, SONDER is now in further development to become a standalone piece. We performed Sonder at
07.2023 Traumburg festival,
Schloss Dornburg, Gommern (DE)
09.2023 Silencio, Amsterdam
09.2023
& 11.2023 Studio WirWar, The Hague
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Images: Ira Grünberger
Videography: Marlene Langbein
Blind Drawings To Music
2019 - ongoing
Blind Drawings To Music is an ongoing project started in 2019. It is playfully capturing connections of movement and emotional response while listening to pieces of music.
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See all available drawings here
Would you like a unique blind drawing to one of your own favourite pieces of music? Please contact me for details. Thank you.
2023
This site specific composition for multichannel sound and light is a scene exploring the qualities of its space and different modes of relating. The piece invites to explore the edges of one's perception.
It creates a time and a space in which affects can be embraced as they occur. The work brings you to where you can tap into the more granular areas of your attention, listening and presence.
“We’re not allowing ourselves to fully experience darkness, but you create a space for that - beautiful”
“Ik vond het wel eng, maar het ging uiteindelijk... Ik zei tegen mezelf, er gebeurt niks met je. En dan voelde het als een soort beloning, dat je er bent gebleven. Echt heel goed!”
“It has such a strengh - this profound darkness.
It generates a constant feeling of something is coming.
You are basically waiting for it, the whole time something is coming towards you...”
“The transitions are so smooth, you are suddenly in it, at all stages - that’s very beautiful”
...reactions to the piece from different visitors
This work existed in two, slightly different, versions so far:
“VIER” - depicted here (as part of the Artscience
preview show HONK) - and “BA.102” as my graduation piece, shown at the 2023 KABK graduation show.
The methodology of the work became a sort of blueprint which lets me adapt it to different spaces and circumstances.
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Advice sound engineering: Andrzej Konieczny
Technical assistance light: Maarten Keus
Images: Ira Grünberger
Video footage: Onur Cabi
Seconds Last Friday (10’)
2023
Welcome to Seconds Last Friday. We are a rather loud stereo interplay of filtered pink noise and “standing” sine wave signals, ready for your exploration. While we chat about and shake your chest, please move around, sing along, hug a friend, touch the handrail. We play with your spatial perception, don’t be shy.
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The piece explored tangible connections and inter-relations between modulated signals, the responses of the space and listening bodies.
Seconds Last Friday was presented as part of the CASS concert series (CASS #2: SPEAKING OF SPACE; 02.2023), organised by the departments of Composition, Sonology and ArtScience at the Royal Conservatoire / KABK.
AFTERTASTE
2022
"The time spent here so far turned out to be a disrupting collage of different sonic stimuli, rhythms and sensations. A feeling of otherworldly-ness and confused temporal perception accompanies the days. Oliveros' question of when does listening to a sound become memory comes to mind. I'd like to use these thoughts and compose with the according sound material of different spaces, times and airflows - from the low highway rumble, the canteen fridge drone to tiny sounds of the forest and soft wind. I'd imagine the piece to play with these contrasting atmospheres."
Listen to AFTERTASTE here
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Developed and produced during "Site Specifics" - a field recording and listening workshop guided by Mint Park at Klankenbos, Musika Impulscentrum, Pelt (BE).
Presented at Oortreders Festival 2022
2019
Acts Of Attention (Traces) explores listening as an activity in relation to space. The installation presents uniform envelopes of seven archetypical elements of the Rietveld Building together with the artist’s own musical interpretation of their sonic origins. The sound piece (21’) is entirely produced from sounds derived from the process of tracing and those of the elements themselves. An interplay between manifestation and alienation allows for multiple perspectives on the work.
Acts Of Attention (Traces) aims to increase auditory sensitivity, to make aware that listening forms a highly important, yet often neglected part of our being in the world as sensory entities. In tracing architectural elements physically and sonically, Alexander Köppel developed a way of paying attention in which he concludes and initiates his multidisciplinary approach to the making and the perception of spaces. In the end, he points at the benefits and surprises of deliberately devoting attention to appearances previously unnoticed and hints towards imagined realities within listening.
In parallel to the installation, one is invited to find intriguing listening spots across the Rietveld Campus with the help of a small map. Specific floor tiles have been replaced, now showing a visual representation of the sonic effects present at each location. These marks aim to help discover the richness of the very sounds we are surrounded by every day.
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Photographs: Public Rietveld, Robert Glas
BUILDING A TURMOIL
2018
How do narratives shape our understanding of space?
How does our imagination?
How do we remember spaces and architecture?
Alexander will use the pavilion to explore our personal relations to space and architecture. This is to happen within sound pieces he will produce per day, based on narratives and voices of people interviewed on that day - so each performance will be unique. During the day, the pavilion becomes an open studio and is welcoming everybody who would like to get interviewed and contribute to the piece.
The pavilion is to become a soundspace in which the visitors find themselves confronted with an ascent of sounds and space related narrative.
Listen to BUILDING A TURMOIL here
LISTENING SESSIONS
2021 - ongoing
In my time at the ArtScience interfaculty I organised collective listening sessions every two weeks. The sessions offered a time and a space to train auditory sensitivity and attention to sound, vibration, other bodies...
A short introduction, mostly consisting of bodily, at times rhythmically infused, exercises helped to arrive in the space and with the group. Followed by listening to a chosen piece of music, sound art or soundscapes, each session concluded with a small “landing” exercise or feedback round and was hosted by a different member of the group every time. This let us explore a wide variety of guiding styles, sonic material and different depths of listening.
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I am planning to organise similar sessions in
the near future. Feel free to contact me if you would like to participate or help out.
2022
Zoöp DataFusion is an installation and on-going research project, which is part of the exhibition Have we met? Humans and non-humans on common ground, organised by Het Nieuwe Instituut for the 23rd Triennale Milano International Exhibition (July 15 – December 11, 2022).
Zoöp DataFusion is created by ArtScience interfaculty students at the University of the Arts The Hague: Philipp Groubnov, Christine Hvidt, Andrzej Konieczny, Alexander Köppel, Leon Lapa Pereira and Vivien Vuong, guided by Rodrigo Delso (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid) and Eric Kluitenberg (ArtScience interfaculty). Cool Mediators Foundation has acted as a facilitator of
this research and exhibition project.
The digital and analogue sensors of Data Fusion Instrument register vibrations, heat traces, sound frequencies, electromagnetic waves, the smell and spread of pollen, the conductive capacity of mycelia growing underground, and the slow changes of humidity in the air.
It has been installed in Het Nieuwe Instituut’s garden since spring 2022, where it reads a space 30 metres wide by 30 metres long and 3 metres tall for eight months.
Data Fusion Instrument registers changes that tend to escape human senses, either because they are too small, too slow, or because they occur in inaccessible areas. The instrument then fuses the different layers of data into a new representation of that volume of biosphere, bringing all the captured changes together in a new form that humans can directly experience.
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Project contribution:
Chemical sensor (registering smells), exhibition production, exhibition buildup