Toto měla být zvuková instalace. A je to deska.
by Václav Hruška
This album is the musical part of an exhibition.
This Was Meant to Be a Sound Installation. And It Is.
9.4. – 15. 6. 2026
Kurátor Alexandr Jančík
The exhibition brings together sound, image, and text into a single whole, with music as its starting point. In the gallery space, a fifty-minute composition unfolds across eight tracks, created using a custom-built instrument—a sequencer that Hruška has been developing for eight years in the Pure Data environment. On the day of the opening, this music is also to be released as an album on Bandcamp, allowing the exhibition to extend beyond the physical space of the gallery and continue in a digital form.
The “images” displayed on the gallery walls are neither drawings nor diagrams in the traditional sense. They are so-called patches—the internal structures of the sequencer, where individual objects connected by lines (cables) process signals. Each element has a specific function and contributes to the generation of sound. The sequencer itself does not produce audio directly; instead, it generates MIDI data that controls electronic instruments (in this case Dreadbox Erebus, Doepfer Dark Energy II, Arturia Minibrute, Korg MicroKorg, Korg Volca Drum, and 808 drum samples). What we are looking at, then, is not a representation of the result, but the very mechanism of its creation.
A digital environment that would normally remain hidden “inside” the computer is here translated into a physical form through printed outputs. This creates a particular tension between technical precision and visual beauty: complex networks of connections, algorithms, and data flows emerge as a distinct abstract composition. The aesthetics here do not stem from decoration, but from function.
An important role is also played by the author’s texts accompanying the individual images. They balance between manual, note, and personal reflection—shifting between dry humour, technical description, and moments of uncertainty. Together, they form a parallel layer of reading in which the artist appears not only as the builder of the system, but also as its observer.
The music we hear in the space is not a fixed composition, but rather a situation—the result of a live engagement with an instrument designed to be “played on the spot,” without a predetermined scenario. The exhibition thus operates as an expanded sound installation, where image, sound, and text are not separate disciplines, but expressions of a single process.
Václav Hruška appears here primarily as a musician and instrument maker—someone who translates his fascination with sound and its structure into a visual form. The exhibition becomes simultaneously a map, a tool, and a record: a trace of a process that is as rational as it is intuitive, as technical as it is poetic.
credits
played, recorded, mixed and mastered by Václav Hruška
2-8 April 2026
cover art photo
Marie Meixnerová
/|\ Anabasis 2605