Death Before Disko 3.1
"Death Before Disko 3.1" (2007) is an installation by Herwig Weiser. It was part of the DEAF07 exhibition.
Death Before Disko 3.1
Death Before Disko 3.1 brings us back to the raw components, it exposes the innards of our technology in all their complexity and beauty. The work plays on associations with popular media culture by sculpting with plastics, metals and magnetic liquids, instead of showing the fetishized end results of informational transport technology. The sculpture visualizes live input from outer space noises which have been sampled from various internet sources.
The title of Death before Disko, a sculpture by Herwig Weiser, is a reference to the classic techno record by Christian Morgenstern. Like the hard drives in Harddisko, Death before Disko seeks to show us the innards of technology. Weiser says he is resisting the trend in consumer electronics whereby complex technology is becoming more and more cleverly shrouded in immaculate design: white plastic boxes with one button, user surfaces that no longer tell you anything about what is going on underneath. The iPod is the symbol of this superficial consumer relationship to technology. Weiser wants to show us the beauty and complexity of the raw components: the material through which the information flows. Using the plastics, metals, magnets, conductors and semiconductors that make up the backbones of our communication networks, Weiser has made a highly aesthetic sculpture. Death before Disko looks very techno; it celebrates the aesthetic of the airplane engine rather than that of the iPod. Just as in Ondulation and Roots, a conversion of data takes place. Death before Disko transforms live input of data from the universe, collected over the Internet, into sound and image. The sculpture thus also becomes an audio piece that surrounds the viewer in a world of sound which represents outer space.
