Lecture by Annette Gilbert: Typewriter and Tape Recorder. On the Early Work of the Experimental Poet Carlfriedrich Claus
Annette Gilbert is a literary scholar at FAU Erlangen–Nuremberg. Her research focuses on avant-garde and experimental literature and art from modernism to the present day. Carlfriedrich Claus was already the subject of her doctoral dissertation Movement in Stillness: Explorations of the Scriptural (2006).
Photographs often show Carlfriedrich Claus at his desk, buried under mountains of paper. Yet somewhere a typewriter is always visible – a constant companion throughout his life. He used it not only to handle his extensive correspondence (22,000 letters are preserved in the Carlfriedrich Claus Archive), but also to compose his very first poems, sound notes, and language experiments. In 1959, Claus was finally able to acquire a tape recorder, a KB 100 with special switching features, and a phase of intensive sound and speech experiments on tape began.
Through the interplay of typewriter and tape recorder, Claus developed experimental set-ups that investigated the elementary material of the act of speaking: vowels, consonants, sound patterns, speech curves, echo effects, spatial sounds, and noise. The lecture offers insight into the workshop of those years, without which later works such as the Sound Process Space (1995) would be inconceivable.
Admission: €6
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