LAUNCHING SOON
KLANGWORT
Das Klangwort Spiel is an interactive word-and-sound game that creates an alternative digital platform for language as material in flux. “Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” asks Zhuangzi. Centuries later, Rilke imagines saying things “wie selber die Dinge niemals innig meinten zu sein.” Now I provide the alphabet. You bring the words. Sound becomes text, text becomes sound. Listening becomes attention — a slowing down that makes room for the prelinguistic, for what is sensed before meaning settles.
Instead of pressing play and listening to a finished composition, the visitor types a word. Each letter carries its own sonic world — fragments of harp, voice, field recordings, unfamiliar sounds and silence — and together they form a temporary composition.
No word sounds exactly like another. Different letters, different combinations and different lengths create different musical constellations. As many words as there are to type, there are compositions waiting to be heard.
While the word sounds, its letters move, shift and respond: language becomes something to hear, watch and play with. When the sound fades, the word disappears with it. Type another word and a new piece begins.
There is no score to achieve and no correct way to play. The pleasure lies in discovering what a word might become — how it can unfold as sound, image and movement.
Rather than presenting music as a fixed album or linear stream, Das Klangwort Spiel proposes a participatory way of listening: playful, temporary and different each time.
Das Klangwort Spiel is a standalone work within Das Harfenklangbuch, an ongoing artistic research project into how perception materialises as language through sound art, text and books, video art, games, installations, interventions and the Atlas, as well as other spatial and interactive forms, developed by Anne Vanschothorst.
BETA TESTING