Florian Hecker

Please join the Historic Preservation program at GSAPP for a lecture by Florian Hecker, a German sound and visual artist.

Please register in advance to receive the zoom meeting link: Registration link

Hecker’s lecture will focus on his recent exhibition, Resynthesizers, staged at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House in Los Angeles—designed by R. M. Schindler in 1936. Resynthesizers complemented Schindler’s “plastic architecture of space” with a shifting ensemble of multimodal components, dramatizing processes of decomposition and recomposition across sound, text, and olfaction. At the core of the exhibit were three long-duration sound works (Resynthesizers 0.1–0.3). Visitors encountered fragments from vast dictionaries of resynthesized sounds, producing auditory zones of similarity, difference, and perpetual transformation. These sonic elements were joined by olfactory accords created by Marc vom Ende and Philip Kraft of Symrise, referencing milestones in fragrance chemistry from 1874, 1966, and 2021, as well as by a spatially distributed libretto by philosopher Robin Mackay, displayed on electrophoretic screens. Through a quasi-molecular, bottom-up reconstruction of perception, Resynthesizers foregrounded sensory synthesis while exposing the limits of linguistic capture.

Hecker’s other recent exhibitions and performances include TEMPLEXTURES, Galerie Neu, Berlin, Germany; FAVN, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Formulations As Texture, horizontal and vertical crossings, Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark (all 2022) and Resynthesizers, Equitable Vitrines, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2021). He has an extensive discography, including: Resynthese FAVN (Blank Forms, New York, 2024), Syn As Text (Etat, Vienna, 2021); Synopsis Seriation (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2021); Statistique Synthétique (GRM Portraits, Paris, 2020); Inspection II (Editions Mego, Vienna & Urbanomic Falmouth, UK, 2019); A Script for Machine Synthesis (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017); Articulação Sintetico (Editions Mego, Vienna, 2017) and Hecker Leckey Sound Voice Chimera (Pan, Berlin, 2015). And, Hecker has been a professor of ‘Sound and Experiment’ at the AdBK Munich since 2024.

The Preservation Lecture Series is organized by the MS in Historic Preservation program.