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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 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. We live in the new Baroque.
Baroque is about excess, layering, movement, and overwhelming perception – qualities, that are today more alive than ever. Our world of media saturation, algorithmic feeds, and hyperconnectivity mirrors the sensory overload of the Baroque, where reality unfolds in cascading waves of too-muchness. We never see the whole thing at once. The Baroque was designed to engulf us, just like our fragmented, multi-threaded digital experience. The Baroque created hyperobjects – too vast, too complex, too infinite to grasp in full. Today, we live inside these structures, scrolling through endless rabbit holes, trapped in the doom-loop of binge-watching and scattered attention. We exist as bouncing super-balls, navigating illusion after illusion, infusions and transfusions of affects, more aware than ever that our soap-bubbles are about to pop. BAROGUE: the rogue Baroque. Disruption, resistance, and loss of control were always embedded within Baroque’s sedative, contrived beauty. Sugar-saturated complexity, ornament that obscures, excess that devours itself. Back to Intermedia Works
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Documentation of BAROGUE - Roccoco Carnage (gradus ad parnassum)
BAROGUE is a transmedia project about purity, power, and the thought-systems that shape what we see, hear, and believe. The 18th century – climax of the Baroque – was obsessed with order. It was a drive that fueled both intellectual breakthroughs, artistic milestones, but also deep exclusion. Standardization and categorization didn’t just structure knowledge; they segregated, erased, and defined the limits of human expression.
BAROGUE investigates how the pursuit of order shaped artistic practices, how the logic of scientific classification infiltrated music, and how these ideas still structure the way we think today. BAROGUE is the awakening from the modernist dream of purity. BAROGUE unfolds through three works, each dissecting the obsession with purity, perfection, and order from a different angle. One of these is BAROGUE – Roccoco Carnage (Gradus ad Parnassum), an audiovisual installation of ceramics, moving beam spots, moving hyperdirectional speakers, moving mirrors, and fog. Its point of departure is Johann Joseph Fux’s Gradus ad Parnassum, a 1725 composition textbook that shaped generations of composers – Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven were amongst the composers who studied with it. For precisely three centuries, it has remained a pillar of counterpoint study. But what makes Gradus ad Parnassum remarkable isn’t just its longevity – it’s the way it systematized music like a science. Fux didn’t just teach counterpoint; he classified it: Borrowing terms from biology, he divided types of counterpoint into "species," with the eventual goal of reconstructing a historical style. BAROGUE – Roccoco Carnage (Gradus ad Parnassum) takes Fux as a lense to artistically investigate the changing relationship between human culture and the natural world that shaped in the 17th Century but which set the direction that Western culture has been following since and that led to the time of crisis we find ourselves in today. BAROGUE has been funded by
LAND STEIERMARK, SKE-FOND and BMWKMS
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