Deutsches Historisches Museum - Verf�hrung Freiheit. Kunst in Europa seit 1945 - Blog

Kristian and I meet for our interview in a room in the administration building that stands out for its vaulted ceiling. Its wood panelling and single large table are supplemented by a wonderful view of the Berlin Cathedral. Its quiet is much better suited to interviews than our noisy project office. After our exciting talk, I actually feel that I have an understanding of what until then had been the least accessible image in the exhibition: Emil Schumacher’s Eruption.  

Q. You are commissioned to create an audio guide for an exhibition. How do you proceed?

A. ‘The first step is to meet with the curators to get a very detailed understanding of the exhibition. An audio guide should not present contradictory information or try to impose interconnections where there aren’t any; it should let the visitors develop these themselves. I always say, that an audio guide has to adapt itself to the exhibition.

Then it is time to come up with a concept for the audio guide: there are two basic styles—linear and selective. You can try to narrate a certain story in a certain amount of time. That would be the linear approach: each new piece of information builds on what has gone before. Using the selective approach, you do not take the visitors by the hand and lead them through in a certain amount of time, but rather you let the visitors decide individually what their points of interest are. That is how it is in the Desire for Freedom.’

Q. What do you have to consider for the concept and how do you proceed on a technical level?

‘It is always quite important to consider who the audio guide is for. We mediate between what the exhibition curators want to communicate and what the public perhaps should or wants to know. We have to try to put ourselves in the public’s place and to imagine the visitors’ point of view. When I personally guide a tour, I am able to see whether the visitors are looking at something other than the object being discussed. Perhaps they are interested in something else completely. That is not possible with an audio guide. I therefore have to imagine what the visitors might be interested in.

So I try to excerpt what would be relevant for someone who is interested in the topic, but is not an art historian. I write the texts, get them approved by the curators, and have them translated. Then the English and German texts are spoken in the sound studio and reviewed with the sound engineer. By then, the music and original recording have been integrated, and the fades, too. The tracks are cut together and the next stop is the exhibition designer or architect, to decide where the audio guide symbols have to be mounted.’

Q. Where do you get the original recordings and material for the specific topics?

A. ‘The last time, I found a lot of material in the German Broadcasting Archives (DRA) for the Focus on the DDR exhibition. They were original segments from a broadcast on the German Democratic Republic Radio Network, in which visitors to Palace of the Republic were asked about the quality of the food and service in the restaurant. In that exhibition, I connected this original recording with a showcase displaying of porcelain from the Palace of the Republic.

In that case, the DHM and the German Broadcasting Archives jointly released a CD titled Voices of the 20th Century, with wonderful historical recordings from various periods. By the Desire for Freedom exhibition, I felt it was important in many cases to let the artists themselves speak. I searched specifically for quotes from the individual artists about the artworks or their overall concept. That is always the interesting part: every audio guide is different, because every exhibition is different.’

Q. What do you need to pay attention to when writing audio guide texts?

‘Although I do write a text, it is read by the team and me—I’ve written it together with three other colleagues. This text has is unusual, because you cannot leaf back through it. You listen to the track again, but it really has to be completely clear and logical. Every sentence has to build on the previous one.

A study done the 1980s established that adult listeners will begin to lose interest after the 14th word if just one voice is speaking. Regardless of whether what they are listening to is a speech or an audio guide. In addition, you often have to play around with German to avoid having the verb at the end of the sentence. You often have to reformulate. If you just read the texts, it often sounds strange with all of the repetition. One needs to add stylistic devices to give it a nice rhythm. For instance, I often use alliteration. The text is not there to be read, but to be heard.

And to find out whether I have succeeded with the text, I have my computer read it back to me, or I record myself reading it and then listen to it. When you write something, its development seems totally logical, but when you listen to it, you suddenly wonder why a specific topic is coming up right at this point.'

Q. What should an audio guide ideally accomplish?

A. ‘Many have reservations about audio guides. A segment on Deutschland Radio cited people who claimed that audio guides had no place in art exhibitions because they influence our response to a picture and hinder us thus from asking questions. We need to take this point of view into account, but with the aim of discounting it, because I think auditory perception is a very special form of perception.

Hearing an original recording of someone represented in the exhibition has a totally different effect. However, many also criticise this because they think the emotional impact limits the visitor’s ability to take in information. We are not doing anything with the audio guide that the exhibition itself does not do. We do not attempt to decode.

People often think that painters present us with a puzzle, which we are not able to solve until someone explains the puzzle to us. But paintings contain references that people who were alive at the time it was painted understand—a famous picture or quote. But forty or fifty years later, people who were not alive at the time will no longer recognise these references. That is where I begin. I would like to offer interested visitors a starting point for their enquiry into a particular topic. But they should still always have the opportunity to interpret and discover connections on their own.

Q. Do you have a favourite track?

A. ‘Yes, though this changes all the time. But now I would say those for Oskar Hansen’s The Street and Anselm Kiefer’s Occupations. For the Kiefer pictures, I thought up a sound collage, which the sound engineer then implemented. Kiefer talks about finding phonograph records of speeches by Hitler and Goebbels in an attic and in an interview he also tells about how deeply it affected him. That then was the beginning of the project, which resulted in these photographs. I wanted the public to be able to comprehend that, which is why recordings of speeches by Hitler and Goebbels are laid on top of each other and end in cacophony and are then followed by Kiefer speaking about how he had felt. So it has something of a radio play about it.’