MEDIA MASSAGE:

Staalplaat’s “The Ultrasound of Therapy” is one of a number of pieces reclaiming the body from a post-material world. It is long ago since Baudrillard pushed the simulacrum into the world of media reception and media art production and made real bodies, real voices and real instruments look a bit rinsed amongst avatars, sonic concepts and programme code segments. This is not any longer the case. A therapeutic process including anything in the range from homeopathy to electroshock therapy brings the bodies back to life. Staalplaat Soundsystem, the audio art collective based in Amsterdam, celebrates the physical power of sound in an installation, which is currently shown at Manchester’s Cornerhouse. The installation consists of a set of hammocks, which the visitor is told to lay down in – in order to be treated with sound. The friendly sonic nurses blindfold you and attach loudspeakers to various body parts. The piece is musical as it plays with Tönend bewegter Form (structure emerging as a physical experience of movement) as Hanslick tried to define sound art in 1854 in his publication On the Musically Beautiful It is the physical aspect of sounds which make the Cornerhouse installation so interesting. It is also the aspect of movement which make it differ from audio pieces fixing your bum on a seat and your ears on the loudspeakers in front of you. On a third level it is also the experience of being able to hear with your body and to forget your ears (and eyes) for some time.

The form Staalplaat found for their installation is convincing - even if I do not understand how the environment could possibly remind me of the French hospital La Salle des Malades in Paris, as stated in the programme leaflet. It is rather rich in connotations to acupressure, massage and even spa or beauty treatments. This is because the sonic treatment of Staalplaat is extremely pleasant.

The concept of understanding via bodily experience is of course not new. Berhard Leitner a pioneer of sonic architecture and sonic furniture built his sound chair (Ton-Liege) in 1976. He states that "Begreifen im taktilen Sinn des Wortes ist Begreifen, Bewußtwerden des Körpers. Die Ton-Liege ist eine Art Konzentrat der Dreierbeziehung von Klang, Raum und Körper.“ (Understanding is touching, becoming aware of the body. The sound chair is a condensed form of the triple relationship of sound, space, and body) Leitner’s sound chair is a deck chair with loudspeakers mounted underneath the recipient’s back and calves. Leitner suggests that the sounds played back might “travel along inside the body without leaving it.”

30 years later Margarete Jahrmann and Max Moswitzer designed a media dress which turns a computer game into a bodily experience. Pong, one of the coolest and coldest games ever, is re-embodied on Margarete’s skin narrow catsuit. The dress, hosting LEDs and an interface to play Pong on her body, acts as a transformer from cold to hot. It performs a double translation of McLuhan’s proposal: On one hand cold media get hot. The temperature of a console game rises according to the apparent body heat of Marguerite Charmante. The second translation shifts Mc Luhan’s most famous aphorism, the medium is the message into the medium is the massage.

Staalplaat and the Ultrasound of Therapy currently playing at The Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Real Player by Jahrmann and Moswitzer.