Virtualization

Technical media reproduce. The transmission, storage and synthesis of sound are based on semiotic systems which respectively reproduce those features of a phenomenon in plastic, magnetic, optical, electrical and digital representations that appear relevant to us in a particular context. The daily experience that a representation can never reproduce a phenomenon in all of its aspects and thus alters the reality experienced points out that even unreal, virtual phenomena can be represented with the aid of fictitious semiotic systems.

The focal point of Bernhard Leitner's work is the virtual construction of space. As do many of Leitner's other works, the permanent installation «Ton-Raum TU-Berlin» (since 1984) provides acoustic versions of architecturally constructed forms.[58] Bernhard Leitner liquefies dimensions and architectural characteristics such as proportion, tension and weight by temporalizing their features. Sound movements follow conceivable architectural forms, the lines of a structure are plastically adapted to become lines of

sound. Conversely, architectural coordinates lend structure to a sound event that can definitely be understood as a musical occurrence. Leitner blends musical and architectural systems of symbols to create a new aesthetic symbolic language.

In his installation «Klangbrücke Köln/San Francisco,» Bill Fontana combined the local displacement of sounds over half the globe with distortions of spatial form and dimension. He transmitted prominent urban sounds from all of San Francisco live to Cologne's Cathedral Square (and vice versa), thus pulling together a field of sound in one place that originally extended over kilometers. Under the parameter extension of space, the acoustic representation of real space is so to speak decoded with a false multiplier.[59]

In his computer installation «SMiLE,» Klaus Gasteier virtualized time by using the hypertext principle to represent a musical myth. The more than a hundred music fragments from an ominous, never released album by the Beach Boys were run—semi-automatically and semi-controllable by the listener—via a graphic