Berlin, 2021. Upon entering Alicja Kwade’s solo exhibition at Berlinische Galerie, visitors are greeted by a large steel ring, over four meters wide, hanging from the ceiling, with 24 loudspeakers projecting the artist’s heartbeat throughout the gallery space. For this central work, “Clout-Count,” we developed and realized the sound concept, design, composition, and mixing. The fundamental approach was based on a sophisticated technical system capable of capturing and broadcasting the nuances of the artist’s heartbeat in real-time. With live data transmissions adding an element of unpredictability and immediacy to the installation, we created the generative composition from original sound recordings of the artist’s heartbeat. The resulting soundscape is dynamic and enveloping, inviting visitors to experience the heartbeat’s augmented version from different points in the gallery. As visitors stroll the grounds, the heartbeat seems to move around the speaker array, shifting between presence and absence, intimacy and distance, and sometimes receding into the distance, almost literally blurring the physical boundaries of the museum. Kwade’s virtual presence affected the experience of all her exhibited artworks, turning the entire exhibition into a living organism.

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