The usual visualisation of sound is to represent the movement of the air particles, their different compression and extraction distribution in time (and corresponding to the propagation in space) as a line in a coordinate system of time and amplitude, as a wave with its ups and downs. Furthermore, if the sound is a stable tone, the wave is periodic, and if it is very fundamental, the peaks and valleys of the wave are smooth, they approximate the sine function. So much for physics and its representation.
Johannes Kreidler’s Twosoundwave images are not scientific (except, of course, a case for art science). Where two sounds are occuring at the same time, their amplitudes add up to a new wave, for there is only the one air that vibrates. This is not what the two waves do in Kreidler’s work. They are also not entered on the same timeline, they are at right angles to each other, as if time were not only curved but two times crossed. As a result, the direction is also no longer clear, and Kreidler consequently releases it: the pictures may be hung in any way, only horizontally / vertically straight it must be. This in turn means that the two waves run diagonally, the imaginary time runs obliquely, ascending or descending. It is more than irony when he paraphrases Duchamp and exaggerates: nude, descending as well as ascending a staircase. The simultaneity of movement that Duchamp captures in the image is doubled again here and the temporal direction is suspended. The sound information stored here is detached from its system. They are transformed by a very elementary artifice: into a picture.
The wave representation of sound is more than just the transmission of the vibrations of the vocal cords or a guitar string. The seismographic image shows excitement, tension and release, trembling, vibration; in the guise of the technical, the soul appears again here.
Accordingly, two waves enter into dialogue in Kreidler’s pictures: Two similar ones or two different ones. A slight, fine pulsation of both lines, for example, which cross each other here for a moment in the picture (one never quite knows whether one is operating here spatially, temporally or both categories), or a strongly excited one that lies across the filigree of the other; two equally violent ones who stand in crossfire to each other. Kreidler’s dramas take place in this spectrum.