Simon Steen-Andersen

En 1922, German painter, sculptor and poet Kurt Schwitters set about creating his Ursonate ("primordial sonata" or "pre-syllabic sonata", according to Hans Arp’s translation), prior to recording it in Frankfurt ten years later. Its consonants and vowels are those of a phonetic poem by Raoul Hausmann, Rfmsbe. The author of noise-based works, making use of drums, sewing machines, and clocks but also cabaret songs, Schwitters made audible, via the sounds of the alphabet and breathing, a beauty of a very different kind which was far from the conventions of language. A century later, in UR!, composer, director and video artist Simon Steen-Andersen, from Denmark, equally iconoclast and indifferent to the distinctions between the arts, blends performance, video and electronics. With a mixture of exuberance and humour, the work celebrates what the Ursonate brings, in terms of its astonishingly alive sound-based matter, its deconstruction of meaning, as well as its choice, distribution and deformation of different material, constituting elements of popular culture inserted into it. Between fact and fiction, the work explores the essence of origins, in the age of artificial intelligence and its logics that as yet have no precedent.