marcus maeder die wunschmaschinen
surround radio play
zhdk records / domizil 30, 2009
5.1 Surround/Stereo Audio DVD

Based on Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia I by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Cast: Antonin Artaud, Hélène Barat, Ivan Chtcheglov, Guy Débord, Eliza, Sigmund Freud. Music based on Kraftwerk, Velvet Underground, Nick Cave and Richard Wagner.

listen to the trailer (mp3/mp3 surround)

The Desiring-Machines

The desiring-machines, a term defined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the aftermath of 1968, embodied the unconscious in a world fundamentally affected by technology. An unconscious, which is not seen as a theatre of symbolic representations – criticism belonged to psychoanalysis – but more, politically understood, as a productive factory. The productive, reality-producing desires are desiring-machines; they are our desires in the interaction with the world. The desiring-machines are a critical affair: the market, the media and politics know how to use the desiring-productions; in its delimitation, psychiatry treats them as illness. The machines splutter, overheat, break down, and, again and again, break up into new structures of a schizophrenic, capitalist society, without ever having realised themselves.

One who sets off on his own in order to liberate his desiring-machines is the Schizo. We roam with him through the psychogeography of a city where he encounters others who have, in their social and creative delineation and delimitation, themselves become revolution: eccentrics, schizophrenics, artists and writers – existences on the thin line between passion and pathology.

The play is performed in acousmatic form (a loudspeaker performance) using so-called Ambisonics technology,
a special surround sound system that can create three-dimensional spatial sounds.

Direction, Music: Marcus Maeder. A production of the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts, Music Department. Speakers: Sascha Gersak, Pilu Lydlow, Dagmar Gabriel, Edward Piccin, Yves Raeber, Oleg Lips, Helmut Schüschner, Jörg Reichlin. Casting, Locations, Assistant Director: Bettina Disler. Production Manager: Simon Könz. Recording Technology: Silvan Gretener, Tobias Stritt. Programming: Jan Schacher, Philippe Kocher. Ambisonic Technology: Peter Färber. Composition Studio Support: Johannes Schuett.