Emmanuel Madan is a musician, composer and sound artist. Since 1998 he has worked mainly under the label [The User] together with architect Thomas McIntosh.
The works shown in the Künstlerhaus deal with ‘errors’ in the standardised system of mediatised speech and forms of differentiation within sameness. They show, for instance, how differences appear in exemplarily produced serial products desite their absolute sameness in theory; differences that become manifest in the context of their usage. As part of the ongoing (since 2008) series Coincidence Engines [The User] has created a sound installation from a large number of commonly retailed alarm clocks set into a kind of steel dashboard. Madan’s audio installation Zwischenlaute (in-between sounds) comprises a large number of small loudspeaker cubes, from which we hear a symphony of curious sounds: Madan has filtered out the “deviations” in human speech found irritating by the media and has combined them to create a composition revealing that such ‘in-between sounds’ have their own meaning and melody beyond the abstract conventions of our language. Another work, in the form of a video collage based on the daily TV reports given by the US Press Secretary, is concerned with omnipresent stereotypes in public media forms.