Klaus Weber
Large Dark Wind Chime (Prototype), 2008/2022

Klaus Weber

Large Dark Wind Chime (Prototype), 2008/2022

powder-coated aluminum, stainless steel, high-polymer plastic

430 x 76 x 76 cm

Large Dark Wind Chime, 4.3 m high wind chime in black tempered aluminium, which was installed on the façade of KW Institute for Contemporary Art from 2022 to May 2024. The chimes, each as large as church organ pipes, produce a deep bass, typically resonating for several minutes. Its vibrations enter the body, not just the ear. The tones seem to oscillate, like misregistered lines in a screen print.

The composition of Large Dark Wind Chime is based on the Tritone (tritonus)—the ’diabolus’ in music, which is also known as the ’devil’s interval’. Diabolus in Musica is Latin for the Devil in Music and was used to describe a musical interval consisting of three whole tones comparable to the augmented fourth or diminished fifth. It is often used as the main musical interval of dissonance in Western harmony.

In the Middle Ages, the Tritone was banned by the Church due to, as sources claim, the interval’s ability to evoke sexual desire and thus, arousing the Devil. Subsequently, the knowledge of the interval was clouded by considerable superstition and was, in conventional Western culture, associated with the wicked and the symbol of the ‘Other’.

Large Dark Wind Chime was initially developed for the 2008 Wiener Secession and installed in its iconic cupola of golden leaves to broadcast a kind of eeriness over the city Vienna. It is adapted for KW in 2022.

Klaus Weber (b. 1967 in Sigmaringen, DE) lives and works in Berlin. Working across a variety of media and spatial formats, Weber’s practice revolves around purposely manipulating everyday structures, the tracing of deviations, and the exploration of the impossible—attempting to undermine the metaphorical and actual power of a functionalist rationality.