DECODING:
RECODING

Conceived by Toni Kleinlercher, DECODING:RECODING brought together literature, visual art, music, science and theory in an investigation of coding, transcription and the construction of meaning.

From 21 to 30 September 2000, twenty-eight writers, theorists, scientists, composers and artists presented twenty-four contributions over ten evenings at Kunsthalle Wien’s project space on Karlsplatz. The programme included sound poetry, readings, text-and-music performances, projected digital writing, image–sound transcription, generative text machines, mathematical presentations and multimedia works.

The project examined how recording and translation do not merely reproduce an existing reality, but generate new realities governed by their own systems. A blue-box environment served as its spatial and conceptual framework: an apparently placeless, shadowless and identity-neutral field in which bodies, language, images and sounds could be encoded, superimposed and transformed.