The Machine as Medium: Dirk Krecker interviewed by Daniel Herrmann

In this conversation with our very own Daniel Herrmann – an electronic and visual artist working as Flug 8 and the illustrator of all our Music To Watch Trees Grow By releases –  the two artists discuss their parallel journeys through the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach. Both studied under Professor Manfred Stumpf, though at different times, creating a foundation for their discussion of artistic processes and technological adaptation. Their creative partnership has recently culminated in Krecker providing the artwork for Flug 8’s recent album ‘Skynet,’ on Ransom Note Records.

The artists discuss their approach to technology as a space for experimentation. Krecker’s typewriter works, where jets emerge through layers of  characters and aerial-like landscapes from punctuation marks, represent a deliberate resistance to digital convenience. “There’s something utopian, something futuristic, but also something retro-futuristic… this computer world, without a computer being involved at all.” is Daniel’s take on Krecker’s work.

Let’s dive in shall we…

Daniel Hermann: I started studying visual communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach in 1999, when you were almost finished, right?

Dirk Krecker: I studied at the Städel in Frankfurt from 1998 to 2000 and came back to the HFG in 2000 to do my diploma, but that didn’t happen until 2002 because I needed another two years for all the theory work.

DH: Exactly, and during this time we kept bumping into each other because we both had the same professor, Manfred Stumpf. I didn’t graduate until 2006 because I also needed a lot of time for theory.

DK: What I learned to appreciate about Manfred was that he focused on the line in drawing. That was good, precise, and I also found what he presented extremely attractive. Manfred worked on anonymized lines that were technically implemented with as much precision as possible, which interested me at the time. There was an attempt to represent technology, the thoroughly designed world, through drawing.

His use of computer drawing was also rather unusual at the time—drawing with a mouse and creating prints from it. Today, everyone has a computer, a printer, great programs, but none of that existed back then—it was more of a developmental field.

DH: I didn’t really have anything to do with drawing before Manfred Stumpf, as I was mostly doing photography and music at the time, which put me in a good position with Professor Heiner Blum in the field of experimental spatial concepts. However, as you had to choose departments and professors for this degree program, I needed a second professor and decided to study free drawing with Manfred Stumpf. I really liked him as a person, and I had the feeling that I was able to better understand and get to know myself and my lines.

What’s more, during this time, work was being done at full speed to systematically replace analog work areas, methods, and techniques with computers in every corner of the university, which made me want to pick up a pencil again.

DK: It was a time of upheaval, and this was very much reflected at the HfG in the mid to late 90s, when many analog tools disappeared, such as the letterpress workshop, the photo lab, and the analog video department.

DH: Did you also create your typewriter pictures during this time?

DK: I was looking for drawing solutions. I didn’t want to become a hand draftsman because I thought to myself, “With Manfred, that’s just trouble; it’s no fun. He won’t accept it if someone else wants to be a hand draftsman.” But I thought, all these cool machines—I want to have a cool machine like that that I can do things with. And then I started using the typewriter at night to generate a picture of a Eurofighter jet. At that time, I didn’t know what a Eurofighter was supposed to look like; there was no internet, and it took me ages to see a picture of a Eurofighter in Spiegel magazine. So I came up with some kind of fighter aircraft. I tried to put it together from dots, and then I thought to myself, it’s like shooting a machine gun. Then I created a whole series of pictures and thought, what a great tool the typewriter is for drawing. It’s like a computer but much more expressive, and then I must have spent 15 years doing intensive research with a typewriter.

The pictures you chose for the cover were also created within this framework. They were all created in a series. I first worked on a certain number of pictures on the typewriter and tried to treat each of them in the same way, but in the end, each one looked completely different. This effect was even more pronounced with the second layer. They still came from the same family, but they all had a different narrative, a different rhythm, and a different shift. I couldn’t say one was better or worse; they were just different. With each pass through the machine, a different characteristic develops, and it’s absolute madness to experience it.

At some point, I’m just there, and the things are created. It is a machine that is no longer needed; nobody needs this machine. I once saw a foreign journal—I can’t remember which African country it was—but there were people sitting in the marketplace writing letters for others. Nobody here is interested in that anymore. On the one hand, typewriters are totally misanthropic because they’re so note-taking, and on the other hand, they create an order that is very cool to work with. I think it’s great when you can repurpose such machines.

DH: I also feel that there is a kind of misappropriation going on, as they were not built to draw pictures, but to write texts.

DK: I don’t want to overemphasize it, but it might be a hack. You can write letters with it, but it’s also like a personal printer. It doesn’t work as well as a computer printer; I can’t print as quickly with it, but I can print and print over it again and again. I can compress it, and I can punch and perforate whole sheets so that they’re just nets. It’s versatile and has an incredible number of possibilities.

DH: When I started at the HFG, you had already finished two years later. We bumped into each other from time to time back then, but we didn’t actually get to know each other until many years later…

DK: I can only give you my view of you. You were new at university, and you just did your thing. You’re so curious, and you were also part of the Robert Johnson Club world. I always saw you there, and you took so many photos and tried to find your way. But what you weren’t was invisible. You were totally busy in so many places. You were there and didn’t necessarily speak much; you were present and got involved.

DH: So the Robert Johnson was also a milestone for me. In the early years, I was there almost every weekend taking photos. At that time, the club wasn’t as well attended as it was later, but nobody could have known that then. Sometimes it was just a sparsely populated white room with a few students or people from the Frankfurt art and culture scene. It was actually only after three years that the club started to become a hype; in mid-2002, I put up my photos on the walls together with Ata, and during this period, the club’s popularity grew phenomenally fast. In this respect, the club was also a door opener for many things for me.

DK: Let’s talk about your music. What I like about your music is that it actually does everything I want electronic music to do, and it comes out of curiosity. Your music is also a lot about club music or something danceable, and you explore these fields and spread a great deal of pleasure in them. Has Robert Johnson also influenced your music?

DH: Of course I was influenced by the music in the club, as it was part of the family. But I wasn’t making any really good productions myself at that time. The first Flug 8 only came out by chance in 2007 on Acid Pauli’s label at the time, and then the first album “Lösch Dein Profil” a year later. Through Acid Pauli, I also had a residency in the club Rote Sonne in Munich and a connection to Upstart and Disko B, who then released my second album “Trans Atlantik” in 2014.

I moved from Offenbach to the Taunus region in 2013 and gradually built up my studio there, focusing more on production and sound engineering. Before that, I only had a few machines with which I always recorded stereo sums live for the first 10 years, which then became the first Flug 8 records. I was on the road with this setup for many years, but at some point, I felt the need to do something different. In the Taunus studio, I created a completely different kind of music that was much more complex, ambient, and textured.

Records like “Leuchtkraft,” “Electric Field,” “Enroute,” the first two Herrmann Kristoffersen albums with Kristina, and “Melt on the Beach” together with Khan of Finland. Then came COVID with its lockdowns, and I thought to myself that maybe I should do something techno-oriented again, and in this phase, “Skynet” was born. I just don’t want to be pigeonholed; I see it as a kind of development process that has grown and evolved over many years.

For me, music is first and foremost a research laboratory. As you know from your modular system, you tend to start by searching for sound and meaning. Maybe something great emerges that you have to keep working on, which then leads to something new, and that’s how the works are generated. Sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes a long time.

DK: I recently bought a relatively inexpensive module that has a certain chip built into it that can be used to generate an echo. But it’s basically a very crude echo. What interests me about it is that the thing itself can oscillate, and if you set the right dials to the right setting, the chip oscillates.

It starts booming and crackling. The self-oscillation produces totally strange artifacts, some of which sound like electrical discharges. I’m currently spending every free hour I have listening to the chip when I turn the dials. I try to play with it and think to myself, what kind of sound world is this? It’s doing everything I find interesting.

DH: That sounds super exciting! I’d love to hear it and remix it if I could?

DK: I’ll make a few recordings and send them to you!

DH: That brings us back to the point of research. You search, try things out, and find or don’t find. The whole thing then becomes a reason or meaning that has arisen from experimentation. Why do you spend weeks examining a chip? You can’t fully describe it; your gut and feelings tell you that.

DK: You can’t explain that to most people either. Most people say you’re doing something, “Ah yes, OK, if you want…” But you say, “Wow, how cool, I’d like to do a remix of that,” because you understand something like that.

DH: I know that your modules sound incredibly rich—after all, we’ve already jammed together. Nowadays, many things have no reason or depth anymore and just float on the surface. Getting there as quickly and conveniently as possible. But that hasn’t always been the case in electronic music.

DK: Yes, but most people don’t know that at all. For them, techno is somehow just there; for them, Detroit is just a term, but they don’t know what impulses led to it, who made it in the first place, and how it was made. That there’s so much that’s rebellious in it and so much that’s emancipatory.

Are there any wishes we still have for art or music? Can we perhaps add a utopia to our conversation?

DH: The utopia is already in your work. When I look at your pictures or all the collages you make—for me, there’s something utopian, something futuristic, but also something retro-futuristic. I sense dreams, longings, science fiction, this computer world, without a computer being involved at all.

DK: That also corresponds exactly to your music. You are the sonic visualization of it. That’s exactly what’s in your music.

Follow Dirk Krecker

Follow Daniel Herrmann’s art here and Flug 8 here.