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Location:BAC ART LAB, Vital Decosterstraat 102 (hangar)
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Accessibility:This location is wheelchair accessible.
An iconic pioneering work from 1970 turned the loudspeaker into a musical instrument and, after half a century, it is as haunting as ever.
Dutch composer Dick Raaijmakers is widely regarded as a pioneer in electronic music and sound art. In the late 1960s, he launched the principle of the “ideophone”; a loudspeaker is not merely a passive transmitter of recorded music, but can actively create sound itself. He achieved this by connecting the speaker’s “input” to its “output”, creating a short circuit. In doing so, Raaijmakers turned the loudspeaker into an instrument, contributing to the development of sound art. The first in this series was Ideofoon 1, built between 1967 and 1970, followed by two more Ideophones. The installation consists of thirty-six identical speakers, each connected to a glass tube in which a steel ball can bounce. The speakers are mounted like a grid in a chrome casing that rotates slowly, from vertical (resting position) to horizontal (apex) and back again.
Please note: Due to the fragility of the artwork, Ideofoon I will sound only every 30 minutes, in a short cycle of a few minutes: at 14:30, 15:00, 15:30, 16:00, 16:30, 17:00, 17:30, 18:00 and 18:30. So be on time or wait a while for a new cycle.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Leuven architect Augustin Van Arenberg erected an impressive new laboratory building for the university, the Institute of Bacteriology. Animals were needed to develop medicinal serums in the building. Therefore stables, dog kennels and other animal compounds were located at the rear. In the 1950s, the university’s bacteriological research moved to the Rega Institute in the Minderbroedersstraat. The Institute of Bacteriology was subsequently redeveloped several times. Since 2016, the building has been used as an incubator for contemporary arts at KU Leuven, first under the name ‘BAC studio’, today as ‘BAC ART LAB’.
Text: Liesbet Nys (KU Leuven)
1967 – 1970
➤ Restauration: LI-MA — Living Media Art
➤ Collection: Kunstmuseum Den Haag
➤ Special thanks to: Bram Vreven
