Harmonicas have a difficult time sounding like anything other than themselves. Tentative, haunting and more than a bit awkward, the noise they emit straddles the human and the mechanical, sounding metallic, grating, train-like and imperfect, whimsical, filled with the breath of the player.

The removal of these human fluctuations from the harmonica's sound is one of the striking things about the multitude of harmonicas resonating in Hollow, Joseph Kohnke's installation in Stride Gallery's main space. The harmonicas, some barely a foot off the floor, others perched on pedestals, others suspended from the ceiling, are being played mechanically. The mouths of CPR dummies have been altered to expel air in a constant jet as small rotating plates joined to bars transform the circular energy of motors into jabbing forward-backward motions that pull and push the instruments across the airflow.

Eerie noise results from this mechanized process, a sound disconcertingly more even than could ever be produced by a person blowing into a harmonica. The noises emitted by Kohnke's harmonicas blend together into one seamless drone, though by moving around it is possible to hear each separate instrument. While they are in time with each other, the harmonicas are slightly staggered so their different sounds can be heard coming together and apart.

Visually, as well as audibly, the installation emphasizes that the sounds are being produced mechanically, in a factory environment, a room filled to excess with machines moving tirelessly forwards and backwards. The resulting cycle creates an odd space, one that remains tentatively between human and machine, between music and noise. While the installation is mechanically driven, a human presence feels as though it is directing the activity in the gallery. The air that flows steadily out from the mouths of the CPR dummies is not breath, but a very close surrogate. The separation between life and its imitations begins to feel very thin.

The noise produced by the plastic lips does not feel exactly like music, but it is reminiscent of the fragments; notes, scales and rhythm, that make up music. Music is an event, the moment of sound creation, to which we are witness in Hollow. But music also has some kind of human content, the possibility of flaws and improvisation that exists even when generated electronically, that is noticeably absent in this installation. Hollow, like a musical composition, has structure and repetition, but the slight variation that gives music form, that allow our brains to distinguish it from noise, never arrives. Every cycle of Hollow is exactly congruent, and while I am constantly waiting for some subtle variation to emmerge from the next cycle, it never does.

Previous works by Kohnke, such as Marked, have similar content to Hollow; conceptions of human qualities and their mediation by technology. In Marked Kohnke used photographs of human skin to form a conveyor belt from which imperfections were cut out by a machine over the duration of the exhibition.

What is particularly endearing about Hollow, however, is that the experience of the work transcends the ideas behind it. The materials are not an allegory; the installation is not an illustration of an idea. What you see, what you hear, is what you get.

Photographs by Drew Anderson

Stride Gallery
Joseph Kohnke