TUNE Installation | Florian Hecker. FAVN

Florian Hecker (1975, Augsburg) works with synthetic sound, the listening process, and the audience's auditory experience, to create installations and performances. At stake in the work is how sound is received, processed, and transformed by the listening body, inviting audiences to engage with composite sonic environments that question the nature of perception and listening itself.

For TUNE, from 4.9. - 14.9.2026, Hecker presents FAVN, a thirteen-channel sound piece in the West Gallery. FAVN unfolds as an automated performance, tracing the blurry boundaries between reality and imagination, sensory perception and hallucinated events. Evoking notions surrounding late-19th-century psychophysics and the quantification of the senses, FAVN follows Claude Debussy in sonically reincarnating the protagonist of Stéphane Mallarmé's 1876 poem L'après-midi d'un faune. In the poem, a faun, straddling reverie and reality, recounts a sensuous meeting with several nymphs. It is unclear whether the experience was an illusion. 'Did I love a dream?' the faun asks. FAVN uses the question 'What did I hear?' as a way to interrogate the constructive cognitive processes that intervene in apparently purely sensory, or indeed sensual, experiences.

Through his own practice with computer-generated, synthetic sound, Hecker extends this quasi-hallucinatory atmosphere. The signal itself is treated as the medium as it continually transforms through processes of analysis, resynthesis, transmission, and perception, creating sounds evading linguistic description and that surface and dissolve, leaving us to question what we just heard and bringing the very act of listening to the foreground.

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