12 December 2016: Formulations is a trans-disciplinary collection of responses to the work of Florian Hecker, published to complement his major solo show at Culturgest, Porto, Portugal, September–December 2015 and MMK, Frankfurt, Nov 2016–Feb 2017. The exhibition brings together works by Hecker from 2006–present.
Both abstract and material, Hecker’s approach to his works is informed by the technical manipulation of sound and, increasingly, other media; yet in their realisation as installation or performance, the works produce rich subjective sensory experiences that evade categorisation. Their computational composition makes the works ‘virtual’ in a certain sense, yet experience of their manifestation is profoundly material, even physical. The works propose new experimental forms yet contain references to histories of conceptual art, minimalism, and performance. Viscerally disturbing, high-volume performances can be the product of austere conceptualisations. All of these qualities prevent the works from being exhaustively described by any one disciplinary approach.The book meshes together a number of different approaches to the work and to its significance for contemporary culture.
Contributions by Éric Alliez, Ina Blom, François J. Bonnet, Gabriel Catren, Diedrich Diederichsen, Christopher Haworth, Robin Mackay, Sarat Maharaj, Reza Negarestani, Michael Newman and Fernando Zalamea address the work along three major conceptual axes of Synthesis, Perspective, and Hallucination.
Editor Robin Mackay (Urbanomic, UK, editor of Collapse: Journal of Philosophical Research and Development) together with designers NORM (Zurich) have developed a unique editorial and typographic model which responds formally to the content matter. The contributions will be arranged according to an experimental process of ‘interpolation’, with fragmentary anticipations and echoes distributing each text across the entire volume, relaying some of the synthetic processes of Hecker’s work and making the whole more than the sum of its parts: a many-voiced chimera and a series of ‘refrains’ or ‘repetitions’.
While the authors’ contributions come from various perspectives and with different concerns, parts of each text will be typographically ‘glued’ into the others, highlighting continuities across the texts and encouraging the reader to piece together a global view of the conceptual space opened up by Hecker’s work—in the same way as, in the work itself, the audience is compelled to piece together fragmented perceptions, cognitively participating in the very production of the work. This formal innovation will also be echoed in the format, with the texts wrappring around or looping from last to first page, making for a book with no formal beginning or end, in which heterogeneous materials and divergent perspectives circulate and, with the participation of the reader, enter into new synthetic dialogues with one other.
more information here and here
