In the organizer's words:

BELOW THE THRESHOLD
Students of the master's program "Sound and Reality" at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf

Concert, installation, performance

As part of Latent Space. Latent Spaces of Art - aproject of the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf.

Under the direction of Phillip Schulze, students of the project-based seminar "Acoustic Art" in the master's program "Sound and Reality" at the RSH Düsseldorf developed works that deal with the phenomenon of latency from a musical perspective.
An expanded concept of music is explored: sound and music in interaction with the visual and media arts, movement, space and form. What are the relationships between organized sound, time and space, and how does the organization of ephemeral works differ within different situation-specific contexts?
The program Unter der Schwelle, conceived for the rooms of the Salon des Amateurs, comprises sound performances, fixed media pieces and installations that are positioned in accordance with the questions posed by the project Latent Space. Latency Spaces of Art , which move between a narrower orientation towards the latent spaces of AI models and an expanded understanding of the latency phenomenon.

Program:

Verena Barié and Finn Leonhardt
Blackbox [Installation]

With Blackbox, media artists Barié and Leonhardt present a collaborative object that explores the nature of text-based AIs - not how they work, but their characters and personalities. The more we look and listen, the closer we get to the inherent self-awareness of such a network and perhaps the answer to the question of what women artists can learn from AI.

Emil Theodor Felhofer
sang- und klanglos [concert performance]

We hear a space outside the room we are in. The walls of the Salon des Amateurs will become a membrane that will make a hidden and invisible latent space perceptible. We are inside the loudspeaker. If we want, we become the loudspeaker.
Performance for window glass, transducer, synthesizer, voice and skull bones

Frank E. Geier et al.
Collective ritual for prolonged sleep latency: Experimental approach and reasonable
fear reactions [Performance]

What we know for sure: Danger always lurks when our thoughts do not float past us on white clouds in the shape of sheep before we go to bed. Because then they stick to the unimportant, to the uncertainty of the coming day, to scraps of conversation and feelings. And that is why our human organism will not be able to shut down its functions.
The monster that awakens as a result loves doubt and delights in tormenting spirals of thought. At night, it walks quietly across the creaking floorboards and sucks the sleep sand out of our eyes. The latency of falling asleep, the time of transition from waking to sleeping, is thus prolonged immeasurably.
Frank E. Geier invites us to a collective ritual in which we drag this monster out from under our beds to look into its ugly face together. Dripping with self-hatred and profane thoughts about the next morning, we may discover a deep hole and sing ourselves quiet bedtime stories.

Dan Moufang
Blinken [concert performance and video projection]

Recorded video footage, field recordings and synthesized sounds are part of the content of a diary that expresses the search for the hidden. The feedback of human thoughts spirals into sounds, finally ending in a sea of frequencies. Seemingly meaningful connections are confronted with meaninglessness in order to make the invisible in-between tangible.

Matthias Schneiderbanger
Anti-Tetraktys [Fixed Media]

Oracle temples in ancient Greece, for example in Delphi or Dodona, were regarded as places of hidden wisdom - truths that only came to light when the oracles were consulted. They were latency rooms, so to speak. Today's AI systems work in a similar way: only through targeted prompts do they produce answers that are often believed without verification. The piece Anti-Tetraktys reconstructs the soundscape of the temple of Dodona on the basis of historical reports - with cymbals, bells and playing techniques such as throwing stones into a cauldron. In contrast to this, a scale was used that was developed with the help of so-called dissonance curves - a method for analyzing the tonal tension between partials. This scale can be understood as a latent structure: It springs from the sound material itself and deliberately detaches itself from the idea of pure intervals. Instead of idealized and mystifying purity of sound, the piece uses an alternative structure - and at the same time questions the apparent purity of oracular sayings, both in antiquity and in the AI age.

Simon Waskow
Questions in the Dark [concert performance]

AI-based large language models appear as monumental entities that can answer all our questions without latency. The philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that, under these historical-technical conditions, we must refocus on the question-answer structure itself.
The title Questions in the Dark refers to two pieces by Charles Ives: The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark. In these pieces, Ives develops a musical representation of questioning on the one hand and the clash of incongruent sound spaces and (surrounding) worlds on the other.
Simon Waskow's piece follows on from this with an investigation of latency and space. In addition to the instruments proposed by Ives for The Unanswered Question, it questions (musical) instances that promise a synthesis of all (musical) possibilities and thus, in a sense, an answer to all (musical) questions: The organ, which as an organon makes all sounds available and controllable via a keyboard, and its cultural-industrial mutants, the prompt machines.

Leili Zamanahmadi
Nahoftegi [concert performance and video projection]

People usually formulate prompts for an AI out of a searching movement. They thus enter into a dialog with the machine, which is often preceded by only a rough idea. Origin, culture and language have an effect in this 'latency'; they shape the prompts - as a question, as a testimony of fears or as a message to a 'familiar' voice.
In Nahoftegi, Leili Zamanahmadi transforms this diversity into a poetic experience: texts - collected and written by herself - appear as projections and meet live music. The Persian title means 'latency' and invites us to experience this term in a new way.