BAROGUE
a transmedia project consisting of three parts:

BAROGUE - Roccoco Carnage (gradus ad parnassum), an installation for moving hyperdirectional speakers, beam spots, mirrors and ceramics, 2025

BAROGUE - Absolute Plunder, for acoustic and electric string quartet, electronics and four video projections, 2024/25 written for NEOQUARTET (Gdansk)

BAROGUE - Zero to Circle, a performance for an audience of four persons, for live-electronics, video and laser, 2024/25

premiered in October 2025 at ORF-Musikprotokoll
BAROGUE is a three-part transmedia project: a 50-minute string quartet with live electronics and four video projections ("Absolute Plunder"), an audiovisual installation ("Roccoco Carnage") and a performance for an audience of four ("Zero to Circle") each open up their own perspectives on models of thought from the 18th century, whose influences continue to have an impact today.
The Baroque era - described by Kant as the "exit of man from his self-inflicted immaturity" - is regarded as an era of high culture, but was also characterized by profound contradictions: While systems of order and standardization were introduced in the sciences with methodical rigour, and while independent thinking detached from religion created a new ethical consciousness, the world was divided up among colonial powers, indigenous peoples were subjugated and newly discovered territories were plundered. The Baroque style reflects this ambivalence: the urge for order but also for playful ornamentation, for discipline and excess. These contrasts can also be found in the aesthetic language of BAROGUE, which is characterized by eclectic opulence as well as formal austerity.
Still from one of the videos from BAROGUE - Absolute Plunder

In BAROGUE - Absolute Plunder, the genre itself - the string quartet as a symbol of bourgeois high culture - exemplifies the claim of European cultural superiority during the phase of global expansion. In this ten-part, high-contrast composition, an acoustic and an electric string quartet interact with a series of four video projections and live electronic expansions.
The point of departure is the year 1758: Joseph Haydn wrote his first string quartet op.1, the first of an oeuvre of more than sixty quartets that turned this setting into a genre and the core of classical chamber music. In the same year, however, the tenth edition of Carl Linnaeus' "Systema Naturae" was published, the first edition of which already 20 years earlier systematized and organized the natural and animal world in a groundbreaking way. From the very beginning, the animal world also included four human genera: homo europeanus, asiaticus, africanus and americanus. What distinguishes the tenth edition of “Systema Naturae” from the previous ones, however, is that he now also ascribed character traits to the human species, thereby unintentionally laying the foundation for the genetic racism that was soon to emerge.
BAROGUE - Roccoco Carnage (gradus ad parnassum) has for the first time been presented at the ULTRABLACK - NON-FERENCE OF MILLE-PLATEAUX in Graz from April 4-11.
The other parts will be premiered in October 2025.
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The installation BAROGUE - Roccoco Carnage (Gradus ad Parnassum) uses motorized light, mirrors, hyper-directional loudspeakers and ceramic figures to create a fluctuating sensual atmosphere. Here, too, the focus is on the systematic categorization and utilization of the natural and animal world in the 18th century, and – especially - how Enlightenment man and woman positioned him- and herself in relation to them. The point of reference is Johann Joseph Fux's compositional guide "Gradus ad Parnassum", published in 1725. On the one hand, it abstracted counterpoint to the extreme; on the other, it borrowed terms from biology to name variants of composition - a striking juxtaposition of rationalization and metaphors from nature.
Documentation of BAROGUE - Roccoco Carnage (gradus ad parnassum)
The performance BAROGUE - Zero to Circle is aimed at an audience of only four people and takes as its starting point the longing for purity and perfection in attempting to draw perfect circles by hand. It refers back to Leonhard Euler's mathematical work, in particular his description of periodic oscillations, which paved the way for the sine wave to become a basic unit for the modeling of sounds in acoustics. As early as 1739, Euler also published his "Tentamen Novae Theoriae Musicae", in which he attempted to mathematically substantiate musical beauty. In "Zero to Circle", these abstract concepts are translated into a ritualistic performance and taken ad absurdum: as transformations of sound that are experienced haptically, sensually and directly embodied.
The themes of BAROGUE are not a historical curiosities, but continue to have an impact today. The idea of dominating the world through systems of order, numbers and categories continues to shape our everyday lives - from algorithms in social media to genetic databases. The ambivalences of the Baroque era are also with us: the urge for rationalization and perfection on the one hand, and the desire for excess, abundance and ornamentation on the other. BAROGUE picks up on these tensions and makes them directly tangible in sonic, visual and spatial experiences.
Photos from the performance of "BAROGUE - Zero to Circle" on October 5, 2025 at ORF-musikprotokoll, performance: Marko Ciciliani, ©ORF musikprotokoll, Martin Gross
BAROGUE has been funded by
LAND STEIERMARK, SKE-FOND and BMWKMS