Together In Electric Dreams: Rike Sitas & Dean Henning

by Alexander Sudheim

“I will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision / And I will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision” intones David Bowie in an alien baritone on “Low”, his 1977 landmark Brian Eno-produced album of downtempo electro-noir experimentation. Had the Thin White Duke uttered these words in 2007 he could well have been describing the anticipation of a performance by Dean Henning and Rike Sitas where one is, quite literally, waiting for the gift of sound and vision. Soon the spell is cast: once the listeners/viewers are drawn into the inimitable and inscrutable instrumental and electronic soundscapes created by Captain Asthma (Henning) and the equally dreamy and disturbing somnambulist cinema courtesy of Rike Sitas it becomes immediately clear that the gifts of sound and vision have been bestowed upon the audience in great abundance. Whether performing under the aegis of their Durban-based underground audio-visual initiative Rustpunk or within the wider collaboration with other artists and musicians that is The Sound of And Band, Captain Asthma and Rike Sitas never fail to astound with the combination of technical complexity and lyrical simplicity that anchors their work.

Captain Asthma’s philosophy of music is remarkably analogous to Dr. Frankenstein’s philosophy of undertaking: both pillage and co-opt with gleeful abandon to create from disparate elements an astonishing new creature that amounts to so much more than a sum of its parts. In both instances the entity they bring to life is both terrifying and tender; a lumbering monster with a heart pure as the driven snow. Blending samples, found sounds, rewired toy instruments, self-generated beats and whatever other aural detritus floats his way, watching Captain Asthma in action is a vicariously vertiginous business where at any given moment the taut miniscus of order could be punctured by chaos and pull you right down with it. In similar fashion is Rike Sitas’ oeuvre both temptress and torturer: the apparently random weave of her visual tapestry is as likely to caress in inordinately sensual manner as it is to chafe the most delicate parts in ways both excruciating and exhilirating.

The knockout blow delivered to both eyes and ears by the combined trajectory of Captain Asthma’s sound sculptures and Rike Sitas' moving images reaches new heights of sophistication and cohesion in their acclaimed installation simply entitled “a city”. Debuting at the KZNSA Gallery in 2006, the work was an instant hit, seducing scores of viewers/participants with its unprecedented marriage of science and beauty. Generally most people get their kicks in the former realm by reading about black holes and those in the latter by gazing at, say, paintings by Mark Rothko. Of course there’s a profound sense of mystery common to both of these yet somehow in “a city” it seems to have never been so deftly conjoined on one screen; on one set of speakers. By and large, science is about the desire to wrestle mystery into submission with the intellect whereas beauty involves allowing the intellect to submit to the fundamental ineffability of mystery. Naturally the dividing line is nowhere near as rigid as this, but nowhere has the Cartesian dualism of the two become so effortlessly enmeshed as in this installation by Henning and Sitas.

Hardly effortless though. Ask Henning how he made that big metal box thing with all the buttons that allow people to control the environment they see and hear and you get an answer involving phrases like “contacts are split into two groups with each linked to a separate contact sheet... these sheets had to be traced to figure out which connections had to be made for the alphanumeric characters (A to Z and 0 to 9) which ended in a matrix of sorts for which I had to solder all the buttons”. Or try asking how the person viewing the installation personally manipulates sounds, backgrounds and characters by pushing the buttons? “Backgrounds load the interstitial, load the new horizon line data, invoke the scaling/placing routine to move the characters about, then kill the interstitial. There are four sound layers: pushing a button randomly chooses one, kills the existing sound there (if there is one) and loads a new randomly chosen one”, comes the blithe reply. In English, somebody? And Sitas, what was her role? Says Henning: “She filmed and conceived everything and described each tableau to me. I just physically made it happen”. Never mind multi-media: this is more like ultra-media.

In an era where the word “installation” evokes images of information-age existential angst involving batteries of televisions and random barrages of images to make some hackneyed statement about desensitisation, Henning and Sitas have created something deceptively simple, disarming, beautiful and bewildering. Raw footage hand-enhanced frame-by-frame with myriad sonic and visual layers and components all capable of being mutated into infinite configurations, “a city” ensures that it will never be the same twice. And if that isn’t science and beauty both angling for the truth it’s hard to imagine what is.

Together the two artists also curated the explosive “Intersection” edition of storied Durban multi-media arts blast Red Eye and produced a perplexing opus in the form of a series of framed damaged narratives which was exhibited at Durban venue Home before being showcased at the lecturers’ exhibition at Vega, Durban and the saartsemerging show in Cape Town.

Though the essence of the Sitas/Henning odyssey through the lachrymose depths and glittering arcs of sound and vision remains a unified enterprise, on occasion their path bifurcates and each investigates separate directions specific to their chosen medium. On this front Sitas has featured as a prominent collaborator with acclaimed choreographer Jay Pather, creating interactive video elements for his works “Republic”; “Paradise” and his contribution to the seminal Dance Umbrella event at Constitution Hill. She has also exhibited at Cape Town’s AVA and written in arts journals about contemporaries Dineo Bopape and Vaughn Sadie.