Mini-Fan Music
Concert installation for string instruments ad libitum
Duration 3 to 5 hours
Collaborative project with Waldo Riedl
1992–95

images / text / sound

Mini-Fan Music is a concert experience that develops more or less automatically by means of the employed components. The staged event does without a stage, allowing the entire space to be experienced as mobile concert hall in which the audience is free to move about.

Ordinary pocket fans standing on the ground are carefully conducted to the instrument strings which are gently, but continuously struck by the propellers, causing them to vibrate. Because the propeller’s strike rate is higher than the string’s oscillation frequency, these free running strings produce similarly rich overtones as well as full and loud range of sounds quite unlike the usual percussive or bowed sounds. Different, complex and static sound structures develop throughout the entire space as a result of the numerous guitars, violins, and banjos etc. distributed across the hall.

Depending on the capacity of the batteries, the concert can last up to three to five hours. After the one-hour-long decrescendo that usually starts about two hours after the concert begins, momentary polyrhythmic structures occur in the piano-pianissimo dynamic level. /