ARTWORK: CEVDET EREK

Extract

The solo exhibition ‘Week’ was conceived for the sky-lit gallery on the upper floor of the Kunsthalle Basel in 2012. At the very centre of the gallery space a mono-block of loudspeakers was playing 7, a visual representation of which was notated for the brochure of the exhibition. 7 is constructed from two versions of an acoustic bass drum sample, which acts as a minimal ‘audio-diagram’ representing the ever-repeating cycle of the seven days of the week. The piece was constructed using a scale of 1:86400 (24 hours × 60 minutes × 60 seconds); in other words, a second refers to a day in ‘real time’. The bass drum sample sounds on each second, creating a steady beat with a tempo of 60 bpm which, for some visitors, is a direct reminder of certain types of electronic dance music. On top of the beat, a computer-generated voice recites the days of the week in English, one day per second. Occasionally, the voice switches to counting the days without specific names: ‘day, day, day … ’. The audio piece used the vocabulary and acoustic characteristics of minimal electronic music in order to represent a temporal unit, by using the means of time itself, whilst the visual representation (notation) was used as an aid to describe the simple idea behind the sonic counterpart.