Collecting sounds--Klaus Osterwald
Klaus Osterwald focus on collecting subtle, neglected and unfamiliar sounds, and explain why those voices worthy of attention. His background is painting and graphic design and since 1986 he also has tried a number of different materials to make sculpture such as stell, gals, acrylic and ceramics. Because he have been a jazz musician, he has attracted by sound and has been gathering the sounds since 1998, when he began the project ‘artistic eavesdropping’, he interested to collect different sounds such as gas bubbling up from the bottom and plants producing oxygen that are easily be ignored in our daily life.
Since 2005，he has been making sound visible by translating suspicious sound waves into clay sculptures. The piece “suspect sounds” were exhibited on the “Ceramics and sounds exhibition”. At the beginning he just collect sound of various area and combine the sound with visual work to develop sound installations. Now he focuses on the psychoacoustic field of sound, the process of provoking visual equivalents of sound in the mind of listeners. He said” The way of producing images and visual impressions by hearing sounds not only in synesthetic ways but in scanning personal experience is the aim of my research.”(Osterwald, 2015) Compared to other artist who combined sounds and visual, Klaus Osterwald’s work is more related of personal experience, and more conceptional than aesthetic works. He try to awaken specific memories of audience, and his works brings an experience that makes audiences feel like they are floating in a sea of sounds. It is meaningful that paying attention to those sounds that has been ignored in our daily life or out of our hearing sense, which could expand our perception by trigger an unacquainted synesthetic experience.