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‘Then he heard a noise from up in the inscriber. He looked up. So was the gear wheel going out of alignment? But it was something else. The lid on the inscriber was lifting up slowly. Then it fell completely open. The teeth of a cog wheel were exposed and lifted up. Soon the entire wheel appeared. It was as if some huge force was compressing the inscriber, so that there was no longer sufficient room for this wheel. The wheel rolled all the way to the edge of the inscriber, fell down, rolled upright a bit in the sand, and then fell over and lay still. But already up on the inscriber another gear wheel was moving upwards.
Several others followed—large ones, small ones, ones hard to distinguish.
With each of them the same thing happened. One kept thinking that now the inscriber must surely be empty, but then a new cluster with lots of parts would move up, fall down, roll in the sand, and lie still. With all this going on, the Condemned Man totally forgot the Traveler’s order.
The gear wheels completely delighted him. He kept wanting to grab one, and at the same time he was urging the Soldier to help him. But he kept pulling his hand back startled, for immediately another wheel followed, which, at least in its initial rolling, surprised him
Franz Kafka, In the penal colony
Sound installation as a result of translating wrtitten language features into sonic composition.
‘Honour your superior’, the sentence which was intended to be inscribed on the back of the prisoner’s body, I spoke out to record and strethced to last around 5 minutes, instead of natural lenght of few seconds. The new value of spoken text, due to its
dramatic and traumatic character supported bythe
minimalism of three abstract pillars, rebuilt the character of Kafka’s torture machine. The vibrations of speakers trembled the nails, which were placed on their membranes, so in the most extreme moments, made them fall down, enhancing the dramatic atmosphere.
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