Obwegeser Instruments (2021)
Obwegeser Instruments is an online collaboration with Istanbul-based composer and musician Eda Er. The audiovisual piece is based on a poem by poet/musician/composer Şevket Akıncı and has sounds composed by Eda and myself as well as Eda’s digital visuals and my collages of found visuals. The project was kindly supported by Goethe Institut’s Virtual Partnership Residency program.
The project lives on its own website: https://www.obwegeserinstruments.com
The Threshold – Fabian Astore and Korhan Erel (winner of The Blake Prize in 2012)
The Threshold from Fabian Astore on Vimeo.
Sitting at the threshold, the presence of childhood innocence renders complex boundaries to a moment of spiritual elevation. Sound design by Korhan Erel.
Recorded serendipitously in Istanbul, Turkey in January 2012.
Malice in Sonderland – Alexandra Reill and Korhan Erel
an excerpt from the live performance at MAK Nite in Vienna, January 19, 2010
Malice in Sonderland from Korhan Erel on Vimeo.
Malice in Sonderland deals with Lewis Carroll’s famous novel Alice in Wonderland (1865). The experimental audiovisual live performance based on a cooperation in form of a real time audiovisual performance by sound composer Korhan Erel from Istanbul and Viennese media artist Alexandra Reill in MAK – Museum of Applied Arts Vienna in January 2010.
The performance starts with original material from the 1933 Alice in Wonderland film directed by Norman Z. McLeod. Using experimental digital methods, the artists examine the theme and the story of this profound fairytale with a phantasmagoric improvisation composed from digital images and abstract sound collages.
Erel and Reill question the societal relevance of Carroll’s bizarrely adventuresome story. The artists’ research on the topic led them to formulate the title anew: Malice in Sonderland. Malice: this change in the wording refers to the desire to injure, to do damage, to act in a hostile manner. And Sonderland? What characterizes capitalist societies today? What makes such worlds so special? Must—and can—a “hero” or a “heroine” such as Alice find her bearings and make her way in a society characterized by competition, in which one must fight in order to ultimately prevail? What choices does an individual have in unscrupulous societies that are oriented toward high performance?
Korhan Erel and Alexandra Reill pose these and numerous other questions on their journey through the twisted paths of Carroll’s Wonderland, and in doing so they create a “brave new world through the looking glass”.
Korhan Erel 