Heike Sperling

A day on Yoko Ono's music @ K20

Curated by the fanzine grapefruits
February 22nd, 2022

Former student and now colleague Elisa Metz has invited my friend, the fabulous poet, sound artist, and performer Swantje Lichtenstein, and me to present our lecture performance titled How’s Yoko Ono? Verstehen oder Nicht-Verstehen in Kunst und Musik at K20 – Kunstsammlung Düsseldorf on February 22nd.

Via K20: Named after Grapefruit (1964), Yoko Ono's collection of artistic instructions, the fanzine grapefruits, founded in Düsseldorf, deals with composition and sound art from a feminist perspective. On the occasion of the exhibition YOKO ONO. MUSIC OF THE MIND exhibition, a special edition of the magazine will be published that deals with works by Yoko Ono and artistic positions influenced by her.
On Saturday, February 22, 2025, the grapefruits team will present an all-day music and performance program at K20 that connects Yoko Ono's thoughts and works with various perspectives from contemporary art and music:
11:15-11:45
Lecture Performance How's Yoko Ono? Understanding or not understanding in art and music with Swantje Lichtenstein and Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling.
12:00-13:00
Listening session for the grapefruits special edition with the grapefruits team.
15:00-15:45
Guided tour through the exhibition YOKO ONO. MUSIC OF THE MIND.
16:00-16:30
Performance with singer and sound artist Elisa Kühnl.
16:45-17:30
Concert by she-dog. Somewhere between art-punk and dark post-punk, she-dog create their own sound. The Cologne trio's songs are hurtful and vulnerable, biting and sweet at the same time.

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Howl (2022) by Mel Bochner. Oil on velvet, 32 x 18 7/8 inches [81.3 x 47.9 cm], unique.

Arguments For God

Tier-list
February 16th, 2025

Read the My Favorite Argument for the Existence of God article by Ross Douthat in The New York Times, stumbled across these lines, "But do I have a favorite argument within this larger run of converging claims? I was thinking about this while reading the effort by the prolific and precocious (he’s apparently still an undergraduate) essayist who writes under the name Bentham’s Bulldog to rank or grade a long list of arguments for God’s existence." and had to follow the link down the rabbit hole:

Via Bentham's Newsletter: "Tier lists on arguments for God are all the rage! Tier lists rank arguments for God on a scale from F to S, where F is the worst, S is the best, and the rest follow a traditional letter grade—A better than B, B better than C, and so on. [...]

Fine-tuning (S)

The fine-tuning argument is widely seen as the best argument for God. But crucially, there are actually three kinds of fine-tuning, and two of them dodge most of the standard objections (for more on the argument, see my very long post about it):

1. A priori fine-tuning: this kind isn’t about the specific laws. Instead, it’s about the more general point that most ways the world could be wouldn’t produce anything interesting. If the laws are very simple, then probably they’d just result in a basic pattern—too basic to produce anything. For instance, the ultimate laws could have just involved particles aimlessly bouncing around, or moving in a circle, or disappearing after a second, or moving in a line. If the laws aren’t simple, then they’d be almost guaranteed to produce random chaos. This kind of fine-tuning is probably the most convincing, and isn’t threatened by findings from physics.

2. Anthropic fine-tuning from physics: this kind proceeds from the striking observations that the constants of physics—the values that are plugged into the laws—fall into an incredibly narrow range needed to give rise to life. For example, if the cosmological constant weren’t in a tiny range, on the order of one part in 10^120 of its possible values, no life or complex structures of any sort would arise.

3. Fine-tuning for discoverability: this builds on work mostly from Robin Collins. What Collins argues is that some of the constants are precisely set in a way ideal for scientific discovery. For instance, he claims that the masses of many of the particles in particle physics happen to be an ideal quantity for us to measure them. This is expected if God set the constants in ways ideal for us to do science, but unexpected if they took their values by chance.

Taking into account all three kinds of fine-tuning, this argument is utterly devastating. Maybe an atheist can explain the second kind by a multiverse—though, as I’ve explored, a multiverse has various problems—but certainly they can’t use a multiverse to explain the first and third kind.

The problem for the atheist is that the improbability is so vast—it’s so wildly unlikely that we’d get a fine-tuned universe by chance—that they must, for their view to be plausible, have some explanation of fine-tuning. But the explanations of the first kind of fine-tuning just transfer the fine-tuning back a level—if the atheist invokes a multiverse, for instance, the multiverse itself is just a physical system that generates universes. But to generate the right kinds of universes—and universes at all, rather than producing nothing—it needs fine-tuning. Thus, even the multiverse just transfers things back a level.

While there are some mild ways to criticize the likelihood of fine-tuning on theism, the atheistic replies are not enough to overcome the vanishingly low probability of fine-tuning on theism. Atheism predicts a barren wasteland—the fact that isn’t what we observe strongly undermines it."

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Students in my Visual Music class acquire knowledge of design principles and techniques by producing visualisations of sound/music – e.g. as installations, videos clips, VJ sets, installations, and computer games.

Visual Music Studies 2025

Annual Show of Students' Visual Music Projects
February 12th, 2025

Every year composer and assistant professor Marcus Schmickler and I host the Visual Music Studies at Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf. This year's class – Nora Bögel, Noah Foster & Dmitrii Shchukin, Max Kasch, Moritz Lörcks, Noah Ronneberger and Darwin Wagner – will present their final projects on February 12th, 2025.

Creating a work for this show is part of the assignment in my Visual Music class at the Institute for Music and Media Düsseldorf's Robert Schumann Conservatory. Many of the students decide to concentrate on transmedia installations, while others are interested in video clips, experimental film, animation, and audiovisual performances.

The students are supported by an amazing team of assistant professors: Leon Monschauer, Jan Höhe, and Christian Schäfer.

 

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Dal fuori by Francesco-Pirazzi, 80x110 cm, oil on linen, 2024.

Shot-by-Shot Analysis

Eyes Wide Shut
February 9th, 2025

This is an unbelievably deep well of inspiration drawn from so much hard work:

Via Juli Kearns: "With the exception of Fear and Desire, the Kubrick analyses are shot by shot, with screen grabs from each. I've been asked why I don't do videos for Youtube or podcasts, but the intensive immersion style of my analyses, the amount of cross-analysis I do between films, the books upon which they are based, and other works, would be impossible with a podcast or on Youtube.
I began putting the analyses online in 2007, beginning with Kubrick's The Shining and Antonioni's Blow-up. I followed with Eyes Wide Shut, A Clockwork Orange, Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, 2001, Lolita, Day of the Fight, and Killer's Kiss. The majority of the analyses were in place by 2011-2012. They were at first on my blog but the load was too much for my shared server situation so I moved the analyses over to static html in 2012. The Killing was completed and added in 2016, as well was a more intensive look at Fear and Desire added in 2016. Barry Lyndon has been nearly completed for a while, and I hope one day to get it done because of insights had when examining Thackeray. I have no plans to do Full Metal Jacket. I began Dr. Strangelove but it has been on the back burner. [...]

Kubrick
Most of the analyses have supplemental posts listed on the contents page for that analysis. [...]
Lolita analysis, table of contents
2001: A Space Odyssey analysis, table of contents
A Clockwork Orange analysis, table of contents
Barry Lyndon analysis, table of contents
The Shining analysis, table of contents
Full Metal Jacket analysis, table of contents
Eyes Wide Shut analysis, table of contents"

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“I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say ‘no’ or ‘fuck you’ or something, it said ‘yes.’” –John Lennon

Yes

Standing on the shoulders of giants
January 3rd, 2025

Via Wikipedia: "Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting is a 1966 conceptual artwork by the Japanese artist Yoko Ono. The work is made from paper, glass, a metal frame, a metal chain, a magnifying glass, and a painted ladder. The word YES is printed on the piece of paper. The work is interactive, with the viewer (or participant) expected to climb the ladder and use a magnifying glass to look at the word YES which is printed on paper beneath a sheet of glass suspended from the ceiling. [...]

Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting has been described by Ono as being representative of a journey towards hope and affirmation from pain. The difficulty in attaining hope and affirmation has been likened by Ono to the intimidating stature of a cathedral.
The relationship between Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting and Ono's 1964 work Cut Piece was extensively critiqued by James M. Harding in his essay Between Material and Matrix: Yoko Ono's Cut Piece and the Unmaking of Collage."

Via Wikipedia: "Cut Piece 1964 is a pioneer of performance art and participatory work first performed by Japanese American multimedia avant-garde artist, musician and peace activist Yoko Ono on July 20, 1964, at the Yamaichi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan. It is one of the earliest and most significant works of the feminist art movement and Fluxus. [...]

This act of giving and receiving connects past, present and future and makes the viewer/ participant into a bearer of memory. The optimism, however tainted with the violence of the past, evokes a promise for the future, if we can avoid future war and violence. The fragments from these performances serve as reminders of the devastation of that violence. The anti-war readings give space for the work to function as 'a gesture of reparation and a ritual of remembrance' as well as to explore the complex relationship between aggression and generosity in the work."

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The Party is Over by Charles Xelot.

End of 2024

December 31st, 2024
I am grateful for...

Aging My GP recommended Outlive by Peter Attia, saying it covers all the key recent research on healthy aging. I’ve studied it and now use it regularly—it’s an excellent resource.

Art My lovely and witty friend Sarah Szczesny has spent several months this year away on residencies. I missed her and decided to visit her at CCA Andratx. For the first time ever, I chose to buy a piece of art because it felt deeply important to have a part of her work in my home.

Concerts Felt so blessed to see many amazing concerts in 2024. My top three were: Nick Cave, for his depth, uplifting energy, and the breathtaking brilliance of the musicians; Mary Jane Leach, for her soulful performance on the St. Peter’s Church organ in Cologne, where she recorded this very piece in 1989; and Róisín Murphy, for her incredible style and fabulous leadership.

Book Couldn’t stop once I started reading All Four by Miranda July. It’s both highly entertaining and a precise observation of the journey and catharsis during the climacteric period. She masterfully captures all those manic feelings, thoughts, and sensations many of us experience. Thank you, Carina Mergens, for putting it into my hands!

Exhibition In the mid-80s, I had the great privilege of studying with Anna Oppermann (1940–1993) at the University of Wuppertal. She coined the term ensemble – process-based spatial collages that encompass both the installed work and the underlying method. This year, Susanne Kleine and Anna Schäffler curated an enormous, precise, and affectionate exhibition at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn. It was overwhelming and breathtaking.

Film Last and First Men is a science fiction film directed by composer Jóhann Jóhannsson based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon. The 16mm black-and-white film predominantly features memorial sculptures erected in the former Republic of Yugoslavia beautifully photographed by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. The story is narrated by Tilda Swinton. This might sound boring, as it did to me, but it is mind-blowing. Do not miss it.

Nerdom Stanley Kubrick’s films feel like an almost infinite source of reference and thus inspiration to me. I deeply admire the complexity, effort, and time that went into creating them. Here is a shot-by-shot analysis of my favorite of his films, Eyes Wide Shut. I adore this website and it so proves my point.

Routine Paradoxically, I find my routines fundamental to my sense of freedom. One of them is my yoga practice. This year, I discovered the location of my basic trust—it seems to reside between my shoulder blades, where it supports and lifts my heart.

Party Went to the 40-year reunion of my class of 1984. Almost a lifetime ago. It was overwhelming to meet so many of my former schoolmates and to see pictures of us from the '80s projected on the walls. An intense, confusing, and extremly rewarding experience.

Past Just learned that my great-aunt, my favorite childhood relative, didn’t celebrate New Year’s Eve either. This year, I started reading the same books she used to read to me to an 8-year-old close to me. Memories resurfaced, and I spent time reflecting on the influence she had on me. She passed on when I was 12, and this year I realized that I never truly grieved. So I finally did.

Tool Learning to use my phone as a tool in my daily practice wasn’t easy. It taught me how to share; through sharing, I’ve found connection, and that connection makes me feel whole, being of integrity. One day at a time. Thanks to all the wonderful people I’ve talked to and listened to, cried with and laughed with—you know who you are.

So, here we are... And what is next?

 

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From the series They Cometh! paintings by Steve Seeley. The body of work is an homage the comic master Jack Kirby and his insane ability to capture and portray emotion thru simple line work and expression.

Super-recognisers

Can reliably detect AI-generated faces, while typical observers cannot
November 29th, 2024

Via PsyArXiv: "AI-generated faces have become virtually indistinguishable from real human faces. In this study, we demonstrate that super-recognisers—individuals with exceptional face recognition abilities—can reliably detect AI-generated faces, while typical observers cannot. Super-recognisers (N=36) and typical observers (N=89) were shown images of real and AI-generated faces and classified each as real or fake. Super-recognisers performed significantly above chance, with decision confidence positively correlated with accuracy, indicating metacognitive insight. In contrast, typical observers performed at chance level, with no insight into their accuracy. Aggregating responses using a wisdom-of-crowds approach improved super-recogniser accuracy substantially but did not affect typical observer accuracy. To understand the basis of super-recognisers’ enhanced sensitivity to real faces, we examined the facial cues used by each group. Super-recognisers and typical observers showed qualitative differences, with super-recognisers relying less on perceived familiarity and memorability—cues that have previously misled typical observers when assessing face authenticity. These findings suggest that understanding individual differences in face-processing ability may help mitigate risks associated with hyper-realistic AI faces."

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“You maniacs, you blew it up!”

I tried to train my color vision

Neuroplasticity
November 6th, 2024

Via Sequencer Magazine: "We don’t understand color vision as well as you’d think from decades of academic study. We have classic theories of how red, green, blue, yellow, bright, and dark encode in the brain. […] 'That’s still the theory you get in textbooks. But it’s a very naive theory,' he said. 'There’s a whole mystery of how the brain really represents color.' […] In a pivotal study from 2009, their team at the University of Washington cured color blindness in monkeys […] Most color deficiencies come from anomalies in the cones, but one form called “dichromatism” is a genetic condition where one cone is entirely missing. The Neitzes treated dichromat monkeys with this categorically severe version of color blindness. And not only did they replace the missing type of cone with a first-of-its-kind gene therapy, they did this in adult monkeys, raising entirely new questions about sensory plasticity. I’m not getting this treatment anytime soon. The therapy is far from approval and, more importantly, I’m not so deficient that I want an eye injection that temporarily detaches the retina.

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Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts offers a unique master's degree program that enriches artistic jazz education in Germany. Their partner is the hr-Bigband – one of the world's most renowned ensembles of its kind.

Workshop @ HfMDK Frankfurt

Self-promotion: How to communicate your projects successfully
September 26th,  2024

Hendrika Entzian, professor for Bigband & Composition/Arrangement in Jazz and also current chair of the master's degree program in Big Band for players, writers and conductors at the prestigious Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, invited me a second time to give a 2-days workshop on Self Promotion.

The workshop strengthens self consciousness and empathy by asking, what do you want to communicate and to whom?

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Kanreki

Cycles of sixty years: A celebration of re-born
August 8th, 2024

Via Wikipedia: "The traditional lunisolar calendars in the Sinosphere (Chinese calendar, Japanese calendar, Korean calendar) observe sexagenary cycles: cycles of sixty years. Thus, living sixty years had special significance as one completed a full cycle. Some saw it as the start of a second lifetime, and thus as an opportunity to give up some responsibility and return to enjoying life as children do."

Via Iromegane: "60th birthday is one of the biggest birthdays in Japan and is called Kanreki (還暦) in Japanese. This kanji, 還 (kan) means circulate and 暦 (reki) is a calendar and we can understand it as years. So kanreki literary means, your years completed a circle, in other word, you come back to the same year as when you were born.

Still puzzled? This comes from the way ancient Japanese people counted the years. They didn´t use the Gregorian calendar but the lunar calendar and each year was counted with 12 different animals, which is called Junishi (十二支) ; Ne (子/ mouse), Ushi (牛/ cow), Tora (寅/ tiger), U (卯/ rabbit), Tatsu (辰/ dragon), Mi (巳/ snake), Uma (馬/ horse), Hitsuji (未/ sheep), Saru (申/ monkey), Tori (酉/ chicken), Inu (戌/ dog), I (亥/ hog). This is still kept in the modern Japanese life. By the way, this year, 2015 is a year of sheep and the next year 2016 is a year of monkey.

Wait, if there are 12 animals, when it circulate completely, it only takes 12 years and you should be 12 but not 60. Mathematically incorrect. Each year is combined with one of Jikkan (十干), which indicate time and space and there are, Kinoe (甲), Kinoto (乙), Hinoe (丙), Hinoto (丁), Tuchinoe (戊), Tsuchinoto (己), Kanoe (庚), Kanoto (辛), Mizunoe (壬), Mizunoto (癸). For example, this year is a year of sheep and with jikkan, it´s Kinoto Hitsuji (乙未).

The combinations are 60 in total and that is why kanreki makes sense as one circle. As the person completes whole 60 combinations, the 60th birthday is also a celebration of re-born. The person will start a new circle of life."

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