Marina Rosenfeld - Deathstar

Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone — in Marina Rosenfeld’s hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action—a plexiglas orb housing a 7-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt Germany— performs a recursive operation, listening to and recirculating sounds continuously morphed by feedback and reflection. This machine music repeats itself in seemingly endless versions, abstractly and in an evolving relationship to the grammars of reproduction and performance, presence, absence, and accumulation. Later, recorded traces of this installation rendered as musical notation produce a series of events—concerts that explore the outcomes of the acts of amplifying, writing, and listening.