Book Description
But musical genres aren’t the only things being brought together. Recently, electronic music has also seen more and more cooperation between musicians and artists. Thus, mix-meisters Mouse on Mars decided to break new ground in this direction and realize a remix album in book form. St. Werner and Toma invited 37 artists, musicians, designers and academics to create contributions to the book doku/fiction based on their associations with Mouse on Mars but without generating any sound.
Using the band’s songs, albums and concerts as inspiration, the contributors created commentaries, paintings, drawings and collages. The results gathered in this book document the visual, artistic and theoretical contexts of modern electronic music as well as a range of personal interpretations of what it’s like to experience it.
The book contains essays by author and journalist Dietmar Dath as well as Professor Siegfried Zielinski of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne in addition to an interview of linguist and cyberneticist Oswald Wiener by Jan St. Werner. It also presents work from artists including Heike Baranowsky, Rosa Barba, Armin Boehm, Adam Butler, Katja Davar, Jan De Cock, Diango Hernandez, Matthias Köchling, Dirk Königsfeld, Simon Lewis, Moriçeau & Mrzyk, Silke Schatz, Christian Schwarzwald, Alice Stepanek & Steven Maslin, Leif Trenkler, Emmett Williams and Jo Zimmermann.
As an added bonus, the book includes an audio CD featuring an exclusive Mouse on Mars track.
The Exhibition
The concept for an accompanying exhibition was born out of the book project. This exhibit aims to present the art that illustrates the various ways that music of Mouse on Mars can be interpreted. The work exists between documentation and fiction, facts and narrative and, as such, represents the range of aesthetic expressions, theoretical reflections and production techniques that this music inspires. It will be held at the German museum Kunsthalle Duesseldorf from April 4 through June 27, 2004.
