Peter C. Simon

Peter Cezary Simon (born October 4, 1969 in Częstochowa , Poland) is an artist and composer.

life and work

After his youth in Poland he emigrated to Germany in 1983, graduated from high school in the Ruhr area and studied physics and electrical engineering at the Ruhr University in Bochum until 1995 . At the same time, I made my first experiments with Super 8 and 16 mm films , which were accompanied by self-composed music. Influenced by noise and industrial bands (such as Throbbing Gristle ) he founded the band Simulation , which existed from 1993 to 1996 and with which he performed numerous stage appearances.

From 1995 to 2000 he studied media art at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts with David Larcher , Fabrizio Plessi , Siegfried Zielinski and Hans-Ulrich Reck . He worked with film, video and sound and combined the different media in sculptural, installation, interventionist and conceptual works.

In his installative and sculptural sound works, the focus is always on the space that has absorbed traces and memories and passes them on to the viewer through sound.

His installation projects include Tin Roof (in the collection of the Media Museum at the Center for Art and Media Technology (ZKM)), Absence , a sound sculpture for the Marl Sculpture Museum , and Traverse Frequency (with Peter Kiefer), an installation in the Deutz Bridge in Cologne for Bridge Music X.

He is a freelance writer for Studio Akustische Kunst , WDR Cologne, and in 2004, in cooperation with C-Schulz, composed the piece Swiete Drogi (“Holy Paths”) about the Polish Holy Week. The sound composition lies have no legs for the studio acoustic art, WDR Cologne was created in 2007.

Peter C. Simon is a co-founder of the artist group LMS with Jörg Lindemaier and Anthony Moore . With LMS multi-channel sound composition is created continuity Illusions that the 2003 Witten Festival of New Chamber Music is presented. In this constellation, the Turing Project emerged in 2005, which was shown in the same year both in the Studio for Acoustic Art and in the Rachel Haferkamp Gallery, Cologne.

Exhibitions of his work as a sound artist were presented by the Sculpture Museum Glaskasten Marl , Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Kunsthalle Mucsarnok Budapest, Taipei Fine Arts Museum Taiwan and SoundART COLOGNE.

His experimental films and videos have been shown at numerous international and national festivals and exhibitions (including WRO 07 Biennale, Wrocław, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia Madrid, Art Film Biennale Cologne, Rencontres International Paris / Berlin Festival, Images Festival Toronto, European Media Art Festival Osnabrück, Folkwang Museum Essen, Munich Film Festival, Image Forum Tokyo).

Peter C. Simon is a founding member of the band Les Éclairs with Freya Hattenberger . Their approach is to understand the process of sound generation as a performance, instead of giving a "normal" concert. In evocative actions, her music appears like a trip through broken soundscapes, noisy soundscapes, accompanied by the sometimes dreamy, sometimes scary sounding use of a human voice.

During their performances, on-site improvisations merge with previously arranged chords. Electronics, everyday objects and things found on the way are also used as instruments. By looping and superimposing acoustic events, Les éclairs explore the poetry of the moment on the verge of feedback and distortion. Every performance by Les éclairs is a situationist reflection on the context of the performance.

Peter C. Simon lives and works in Cologne.

Exhibitions

• 2012 pictures against the dark. Video art from the imai archive at KIT , Kunst im Tunnel , Düsseldorf

Web links

• Artist's website