A fascinating and intense audio-visual performance, titled The Interests Are At Stake, uses a mix of projections, turntables and experimental music in exploring the hidden inner imagery and sounds of money.

Developed by German composer and experimental musician Timo Kreuser alongside French visual artist and filmmaker Guillaume Cailleau, the production explores value in both artistic expression and monetary exchange.

The two are touring Southeast Asia in January and February, hosting a series of workshops, exhibitions and performances in four cities, including Bandung in West Java, Surakarta in Central Java and Yogyakarta.

The performance in Jakarta on Jan. 31 was hosted by the German cultural center Goethe-Insitut Indonesien, which calls it an exploration of “the sounds and imagery of money”. Goethe also collaborated with French cultural center Institut Français d’Indonésie, nonprofit art space Studio Plesungan and music education space Ethnictro for the event.

Director of the Goethe Institut Indonesien, Stefan Dreyer, called the production a performance of experimental music and noise. “It’s an intense evening” he said, explaining the performance was designed to explore who and what defines change and exchange, especially in value.

Kreuser said he would not call the performance expression — but communication. “We have no real input from our instruments,” he says, adding that they were trying to launch a mechanism that you could only change in its pace.

Experimenting: French visual artist and filmmaker Guillaume Cailleau reveals details of everyday occurrences by showing them in other mediums, such as this performance.

The other half of the artist duo, Cailleau, says the performance can sometimes be controlled but “sometimes we let it go crazy”.

The distortion that is a trademark of Cailleau’s film work varies in intensity alongside Kreuser’s experimental and high-pitched variable music — a result of the visual and audio material being constantly fed back into each other.

The music part of the performance uses a mix of heavy bass and high pitched rhythms accompanied by distorted and flashing projections that spread across the stage, the performers and the backdrop alike.

Simultaneously, images of money such as turntables covered with the nonexistent three euro coin and a looped clip of a 500 euro bill being printed formed the visuals.

The nature of the performance and use of turntables and computers mean no two performances are exactly the same.

Kreuser describes that grooves form in the turntables they use, incorporating degradation of the materials they use as part of the performance.

The live creation of images and music means the experience cannot be recorded and is therefore ineligible to be an installation. “When it’s going to play, it’s never going to play the same again” Kreuser said.

On a mission: German experimental musician and composer Timo Kreuser uses his music to comment on art, music and society.

The pair say they “[approach] objects as container of signifying function” and ignore the regular features of objects, instead choosing to focus on the “potential of the object itself as sonic and visual stimulator”.

At the start of the project, they were asking themselves how they could explore the question of value in a sonic video format.

The artists also explored the relationship between their work and a capitalist society.

“When we started this project, we were thinking and being purist about capitalism,” Kreuser says.

“In this project, it is about money,” Cailleau says, noting the performance also proposes questions in an exchange with the artists, the environment and the audience.

Their goal is to mold the meaning of money and value into new contexts, undermining the audience’s original understanding of these concepts and how they relate to them.

They said their performance did not seek to provide any answers, only to explore questions about how value is determined in art and monetary terms as well as questioning aspects of capitalism.

Kreuser said the distorted details of the bill projected on the screen during the performance were “small cracks in capitalism as we see it”.

“They’re honest about it [failures of capitalism] we just don’t want to see it,” he says. (ste)

Artist duo: The artists perform with the projection spread over them.

— Photos courtesy of Goethe-Insitut Indonesien

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Isabelle Harris traveled to Jakarta with the assistance of the ACICIS Study Indonesia program.