In order to expand their acoustic capabilities they will be turned into sound machines by breaking and redesigning existing electronic circuits. Due to short-circuiting and redirecting the current, new chaotic circuits emerge that create unpredictable effects to the device and its acoustic behavior.
“We started to realize that you get really good pictures out of a computer when you short circuit the hardware in a night of unsuccessful programming and after attacking it with a knife. Then we tried the same with a cable providing an audio-signal instead of a knife and got the pictures to actually jump to the bass. That was the starting point of our life performance. The video you can find online is a really early one, I’m cutting a more up to date video at the moment, because we extended our show with some performative elements like a massive hammer, a circular saw and fire. Then we built the »shockbot«, because we thought that we don’t need to kill the computers, they can actually destroy eachother on their own. This is the very short history of our work.”
Ulrich Emanuel Andel was born 1979 in Vienna, Austria. At the age of 22 he started his studies at the University of Applied Arts and focused on “Visual Media Design” under the supervision of Peter Weibel and Tom Fürstner. Also 2005 Emanuel Andel organized a series of events to encourage the culture of VJs in Vienna called “Equaleyes”. From 2005 to 2006 he spent a year squatting in London and studying at the Ravensbourne College of Communication. In 2006 Emanuel was co-founder of the media art documentation platform tagr.tv. He lives and works in Vienna.
Christian Gützer’s career began in the metalworking industry, where he trained as a machine tool manufacturer and qualified at the age of 22. After this, he also studied “Visual Media Design” in Peter Weibel’s class at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. He graduated in 2007 with his work “Grow – Früchte des Kronos” (”grow – fruits of the kronos”) which engages with the question of artificially manipulating the growth of plants and the implications of this. 2003 Emanuel Andel and Christian Gützer founded the art group 5VOLTCORE and created works that deal with the behavior of closed and formal systems and their manipulation. They showed their works at various festivals from Madrid to Tokyo and won the Transmediale Award in 2005.
- 5voltcore.com – Homepage of 5VOLTCORE
