Artist: Florian Hecker
Exhibition title: Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings
Venue: Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark
Date: February 12 – April 2, 2022
Photography: GRAYSC / All images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Simian, Copenhagen
Note: Exhibition booklet is available here
Anti-Timaeus
Critias: ‘Nothing is of itself ever any one thing.’ But then tell us Socrates, does not the old man of Abdera err, for the singing of a nightingale is itself by itself of one particular quality rather than the other, that it is not a croak of a frog at night or the crowing of a rooster at dawn? Is it not the case that all songs of this world are distinguished as they increase and decrease, enlarge and shrink from one dimension to another, as they are added to and subtracted from one another, composed and decomposed so as to appear and disappear in the receptacle of chora as this song rather than the other? Is it not my old friend, that so long as songs are mixtures of ever so subtle motions and stasis, sameness and difference, combined and divided in the crucible of the third term which is space, a song comes to be as what manifests a particular quality all by itself? And is it not that a particular quality in its essence the disclosure, the aletheia of a thing’s identity understood as that which is revealed not in spite of its differences with other things, but by virtue of how it becomes identical to itself and only itself?
Socrates: Let me set before you an inquisitive scene, my companion. A scene retold to me by a restless old soul. Imagine a river named Lethe. It is a stream which flows in the opposite direction of recollection and memory, wakefulness and disclosure. Revelation backwards as one might say. Individual souls as what have a foot in the sensory and the heavenly forms float in it as undercurrents subsumed by this greatest drift. We are not interested in all those souls which are carried by the drowning torrent, but only one soul in particular. Assume that this soul is none other than the soul of the great old man of Abdera, Protagoras. Further assume through an ingenious trick of mind that the soul of Protagoras—a sonorous understream—has bifurcated to two as a bulb can be split and give rise to two similar plants. In this case, it would be Protagoras and its klon which is an imitation of Protagoras in such a fine-grained way that if a divine observer looked at these two souls or undertows of Lethe with the keenest eyes and ears, it would have only seen the ever-diminishing grains of difference. To this observer, there is nothing that perceptually sets apart Protagoras from its klon. In being two underflows of Lethe as that which runs against all recollections, we can never assert that this is merely a klon of Protagoras. But more decisively, we can never determine—in a twist of fate in this river—that Protagoras as a man of thus-and-so qualities ever existed to begin with. It could be the case that what we saw as the streaming soul of Protagoras was always the specious stream of its klon, almost identical to Protagoras but not the old man of Abdera himself and a certainly a different soul all by itself. For all re-presentations of Protagoras in this river are the presentations of what rejects representation. So tell me now, what does allow us to discern between two streams which were in principle distinguishable but were rendered indiscernible in the flow of Lethe? What is Protagoras now, a thing of particular quality or a thing that has forgotten its quality and is thus of Lethe?
Critias: If this is an allegory of the undifferentiated and unlimited flux of a stream wherein no one can find Protagoras as having such particular qualities as opposed to the other, where everyone falls in the abyss of indiscernibility, then who are we to distinguish this rivulet as this Protagoras as opposed to the Socrates?
Socrates: Because we are the ferrymen.
-Reza Negarastani
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulation As Texture [horizontal crossing: epochs 102/52/500] Pluriphonic computer-generated sound, software, loudspeaker system, acoustic panel system; 24 min 20 sec, 2017-2021. Texture synthesis algorithm by Axel Röbel and members of the Analysis Synthesis Team, I RCAM, Paris; original sound synthesis software design by Alberto de Campo
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulation As Texture [vertical crossing: epochs 500/500/500] Pluriphonic computer-generated sound, software, loudspeaker system, acoustic panel system; 24 min 20 sec, 2017-2021. Texture synthesis algorithm by Axel Röbel and members of the Analysis Synthesis Team, I RCAM, Paris; original sound synthesis software design by Alberto de Campo
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen
Florian Hecker, Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, 2022, exhibition view, Simian, Copenhagen