Robert Henke
It resonates within the contemporary framework of our times, captivating a diverse audience, from nostalgic enthusiasts in their 60s to unsuspecting 20-year-olds. Henke's work is timeless, existing in a continuous dialogical flow between nostalgic vintage futurism and expressive minimalism, ever-present in its eternal recurrence. Winner of the Best Production award at the 67th International Festival of Contemporary Music - La Biennale di Venezia in 2023, the project was developed by Robert Henke and Anna Tskhovrebov.
Robert Henke
Software, tools and algorithms inner poetics
Robert Henke stands as a key figure in the realm of international electronic music. Born in Munich in 1969 and then moved to Berlin, he is an absolute pioneer of electronic sound culture, a researcher in the field of audiovisuals, and, among other things, the co-author of the Ableton Live software, which has completely redefined the performative aspect of electronic music, revolutionizing the way electronic music is composed and executed. Berlin soundscapes, dub-techno music, ambient-drone, the construction of bespoke music hardware, and immersive visual installations: Henke's multifaced body of work pushes the boundaries of technology and machine language, surprisingly turning these limitations into his conceptual cornerstone.
In the Lumière project, for instance, Henke uses lasers and synthetic sounds to create experiential performances that challenge the audience's sensory perception, seamlessly blending sound and visual adventure. Henke extensively explores noise as a concept to create intricate sound textures. He’s influenced by theories and practices that view sound as a form of temporal sculpture. His sound philosophy aligns with that of artists like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who considered sound a plastic material to be shaped. Henke uses software and algorithms to manipulate sound in ways that challenge conventions and create new listening experiences.
Coming from an engineering background, Henke considers the creative process's foundation to be the tools he programs and the algorithms that drive them. His research focuses on exploring both virtual and physical spaces, using sounds and images, environmental recordings, photography, and light, transformed, rearranged, and modulated by real-time mathematical rules.
Henke embodies the ideal convergence of technology and art: the internal computational processes of the various devices he programs and creates are his active collaborators, and from this synergy arises the electronic music as we understand it today.
As it once said, "The challenge and fascination of working with technology in art is that you have to find a balance between controlling the medium and letting it lead you to unexpected places. Sound is the most powerful tool for evoking emotions, memories, and a sense of place. My work aims to explore and extend the boundaries of this medium".
The CBM 8032 AV project structure
A beautifully obsolete technology, limited and nostalgically poetic from forty years ago, set against the cultural backdrop of a 21st-century Milan during Terraforma. On stage, five Commodore 8032 enact their inner process and machine-language crafting an elegant live performance with a nostalgic undertone.
“The CBM 8032 AV project is as much a technological adventure as an artistic research project”, as stated in the presentation paper. In This project, a result of intense teamwork and a profound knowledge of machines and graphic design, Henke uses 40-year-old computers in a counterintuitive concert, pushing technology to its boundaries. Though art is sometimes the child of irrationality and emotion, in this case it’s the engineering rationality, the technical limitations of microprocessors, and above all, the ancient beauty that is the true fetish: everything is clear, structured, logical, rational, intuitive, precisely connected. The language of the machine becomes music, a hyper-contemporary experience: the sonic poetry of the display.
The installation is entirely self-sufficient and is philologically and faithfully installed in its original and extreme elegance and minimalism. CBM 8032 AV is performed with five COMDORE CBM 8032 computers, each featuring a single 8-bit CPU running at 1MHz with 32 kbytes of total memory. On the set, a green monochromatic cathode ray tube screen displays the video output of the computers. The sound composition consists of several short interludes followed by a pause, each with its own dedicated graphical algorithm. An experimental visual and acoustic environment is created, inviting new modalities and depths of listening, composed of repeatable sounds and ephemeral loops of turning on and off. The indeterminacy of an open composition that makes lo-fi soundscape its conceptual muscle.
The potential sonic palette is restricted, composed of low-resolution constant waves: among the possible sounds are percussive sonorities, bass drum tones, hit-hants, claps, wavetable-type timbres, reverberations and numerous variations. The intervals between compositions create a narration, speaking of Berlin's typically less-is-more complexity. Sounds modulated solely in pitch, frequency and rhythm create a futuristic live-mixed performance that entrusts its poetics to the study of technique and the extreme simplicity of the medium. They are noises: as John Cage suggests, "making music is merely a matter of organizing noises, transforming them into sounds".
What happens on stage?
Performance and composition technical background
The setup features a basic system architecture comprising five reconditioned computers, each allocated distinct roles and running bespoke software developed entirely by Henke's team. Within this bespoke network, the five computers fulfill varied functions: three CBM units act as music sound generators interfaced with a rack system and an audio effects mixer, while one unit serves as the graphic generator. All signals are synchronized through a clock equipped with the same microprocessor as the CBM units, which orchestrates and sequences operations across these machines (the clock being the Firebird, an 8-bit computer crafted by Robert specifically to interact with CBM 8032 AV). Programming unfolds on the main computer employed as the sequencer, directing the musical data sequences of the other units.
The performance is structured into ten pieces. Each piece can feature a maximum of eight distinct graphical and audio patterns, with a theoretical limit of 256 possible “notes” per piece.
A pulse, a musical rhythm, is sent from the clock device to guide the sequencer. The sequencer organizes and reproduces the notes and visual commands (restricted to speed + rhythm), generating unique patterns for each computer. This process crafted the various scenes of the performance, the different events that structure the “acts” of the performance. Each note is represented by a single byte, and only one of the 256 possible tones can be played at any given moment. The same principle applies to images. The series of audio-visual instructions manually transmitted by the artist to the computers behave differently depending on the order in which they receive the notes, thus enabling the creation of a profound, complex, and immersive composition with minimal intervention.
The live, exclusively active act, through which the artist performs the piece, occurs on the main computer: Henke is adjusting various audiovisual levels, controlling the progression of a genuine electronic musical piece, gradually altering its parameters. Hands on the keys, tweaking raw and neutral sounds alongside stark and eloquent digital effects — an improvised and spontaneous execution.
searching for credits
loading locks free.
ready.
rundy.
new
Ready.
? out of data error
Ready.
Grand finale. The concert's closing piece culminates with a harmonious drone gradually diminishing in the background and a continuous reduction of graphical elements on the screen until total darkness, with only the deep drone sound remaining throughout the concert's concluding segment, the credits. The sequencer computer displays names of contributors and detailed technical specifications of the computers in a visual style reminiscent of early terminal interfaces.
Failure = Success
Making limitations the source of creative energy.
Henke's first synthesizer was a Juno 6. As a young musician, Henke played in a band and owned just one synthesizer, a Walkman and a tape deck capable of recording: he built a budget mixing console with wires and transistors to play. This initial experiment paved the way for something truly innovative and revolutionary once he set foot in Berlin.
“At the end of the day, the pace of the human person define the result”, Henke one said. When you work with computers, typing commands, you change something: there is still a human rhythm to it, just in the top on the way of interaction, and this defines the overall musically art. The early 80s are time where technical advances were so radical and that became so visible to a mainstream culture: here’s the birth of personal computers, available on your home’s desk. You read 25 pages manual about how to use machine and you know everything you need: that’s quite liberating. And then Internet, computer games, laptop performance…These five machines only can display green and very limited number of graphic symbols: in 1980 this was not seen as sufficient to do one hour performance. Nowadays, we’re surrounded with virtual reality with billions of colors with un limited channels of sounds; suddenly, one hour single green screen experience becomes innately interesting. If in 80s the research are focused on “the best we can do”, now is the opposite: We are fascinated by reduction, extreme synthesis, the ephemeral, the imperfect, super focus on one thing only.
“One thing I learn from this project is that within all these limitations, you can create an enormous amount of artistic freedom”, said Henke. Given the extreme strict technical limitations + the combination of raw sound + the processing + a small mixing desk that regulates everything, turned out a surprisingly powerful live performance. On stage, what the artist does at the beginning its just programming the sequencer, which look very similar to hacking code. There’s not a graphical users interface but just text-based sequence, kinda live coding.
One of Henke's inspirations is Manfred Moore, a german computer graphic pioneer artist. he started using computers to create graphics in the early 60s and he combined very simple rules with some random algorithms to create geometric drawings, made by perfect straight lines. The key is here: having a mix of very strict rules and a mix of some uncertainty and some combinations, stop. The operating system is just doing your own stuff and the computer executes nothing more than what you expressly tell the CPU in a machine language: no indirection, no misunderstanding. It is a fact: within limitations, humans are capable of thinking at their best.
The beauty of minimalism: the video generating system
A vast widescreen mirrors what we observe in miniature on CBM monitors. The focus lies in exploring ways to infuse interest into simplicity and crafting profoundly simple yet potent visual frameworks.
The rudimentary video output, conceived from the outset to be futuristic and forward-looking, prompts a question: how to translate basic graphical forms displayed on a green cathode-ray tube to a large, high-resolution live screen? Filming the screen proves inadequate. Addressing this challenge, the team devised a solution: harnessing contemporary technology. The CBM generates characters transmitted to another CPU (an XMOS type) swiftly delivering data to the screen, encompassing the characteristic flicker of the old display, which fades gradually. The expansive screen behind reconstructs character sequences row by row, exhibiting near-perfect synchronization, albeit with minimal discernible lag.
CBMs possess limited graphic prowess and lack a high-resolution graphic mode. The monochromatic cathode-ray tube display spans 25 rows and 80 characters, offering 2,000 potential characters, each represented by a single byte. Activating a screen involves simply writing a byte to denote a character and its position. Each performance iteration employs a unique graphic algorithm comprising rhythms, shapes, sequencing and micro movements.
Commodore 8032, the progenitor of modern personal computers.
In his teenage years at high school in the early '80s, Henke started programming on the small CBM version, which was considered state-of-the-art at the time, using only a paper manual. As Henke recounts, "Back then, developers always had to find clever solutions to the machines' limiting problems. The computer code and hardware embody the Bauhaus concept of 'form follows function' out of necessity. There's a fascinating beauty in this". The extreme reduction, rawness, and timeless allure of green characters against a black backdrop were the CBM features that artistically fascinated him the most.
The CBM 8032 was the first computer designed for the American business market, developed in the latter half of 1979 and produced from 1980 onwards, quickly becoming a resounding success, particularly in Germany. Comprising a chassis, monitor, motherboard, power supply, keyboard (those more seasoned among us will recall the distinctive sound of its keys), and an external floppy disk drive, the CBM features a 12-inch CRT monitor in monochromatic green, capable of displaying 80 columns by 25 lines of text. Its numerical moniker "8032" denotes its capacity for 80 columns and its groundbreaking 32 KB of RAM. Equipped with a piezo speaker for emitting basic sounds, the computer facilitated memory expansion and connectivity to peripheral devices like printers and floppy drives. The CBM 8032 made notable appearances in several films and chronicles the saga of human technological evolution, serving as a definitive precursor to more sophisticated contemporary devices and a prized collectible. It pioneered the teaching of programming and computer science in schools. Many developers, artists and creative minds have developed software emulators enabling the execution of original programs on modern-day hardware. The constraints imposed by this computer (no updates, hardware modifications, third-party software, cloud services, libraries, or black boxes...) embody its profound potency, captivating sound artists, graphic designers and creators alike.
How often do we find ourselves disheartened, frightened and daunted by the limitless possibilities of today's technology? Confronted with abundance, we often restrict ourselves in the face of the expansive technological prospects and advancements. Let us not deceive ourselves.
Terraforma EXO: transcending perimeters, permeating public spaces, embrace change
And so, thanks to Terraforma Exo, right at its eighth edition, for allowing us to experience this performance of ancient and analog beauty, whose open composition embodies the festival's new concept.
Terraforma EXO, conceived by the creative agency Threes Production in 2014 as an international festival of experimental music, primarily functions as a research platform driven by profound expertise and guided by values of care and respect for the environment. The name draws inspiration from "terraform," the theoretical process enabling life on a planet by creating a suitable atmosphere. Sound is artistically investigated as capable of shaping new modes of existence more consciously in the world and fostering new synergies and coexistence. Terraforma pioneers satellite projects experimenting with diverse approaches and art forms across various cities and contexts including Milan, Rome, and Paris, alongside the editorial project "Terraforma Journal”. Originally hosted in the memorable environment and gardens of Villa Arconati, this year the festival has redefined its mission. Named "exo," from the greek "external", "from outside," the project aims to break out and permeate, detoxifying sonically, diverse locations in Milan's city center, "cultivating musical culture and sonic ecology." The festival fosters connection and dialogue with the international artistic landscape, grounded in passionate knowledge stemming from ongoing study and strong human ties. The dislocation of various Terraforma events was, unlike previous editions, more inconvenient and less practical, it must be said, but the offering is enjoyable and well-received.
The event took place between June 15th, 2024, across a new landscape spanning the historic Teatro Burri in Parco Sempione, Giardino della Triennale Milano, and - for the pure clubbing component- in collaboration with Gatto Verde on Via Toffetti. We experienced site-specific installations specially commissioned for the occasion, live performances, concerts, visual and video art, soundwalks and major international artistic contributions, including David Toop, Caterina Barbieri, Dj Nobu, Eraldo Bocca, Kembra Pfahler, and the Portuguese curator Margarida Mendes. The day of June 16th in Sempione was animated by numerous contemporary sound artists and DJs, featuring an unconventional lineup including Plethor X, Nidìa & Valentina Magaletti, Kelman Duran, and Chima Isaaro.
The sounds and natural settings created two days of widespread and amplified experiences, elegantly blending past and present, cultures and historical periods. An stimulating ecosystem of people and sounds inspired study, reflection, dancing, meeting new people… and enjoyment. Thank you Terraforma, see you next time!
words by MATILDE CRUCITTI
photography ARIA RUFFINI
More to read
