Beckett’s eye pieces are the starting point for the production series launched in January 2000 "... the whole thing’s coming out of the dark" by Klaus Buhlert. The designation eye pieces is used for those texts of Beckett which create in an imposing way movement and displacement, changes in constellation or distortions in perspective between things and/or observers. The three sources are segments taken from the novel Molloy (1951) and the prose texts Company (1980) and The Image (1959).

Phase 1 of the work-in-progress production was the acoustic implementation of the three texts selected with the three performers Natasha Parry, Raymond Federman, Barry McGovern and the musician Uwe Dierksen for a radio and CD production (intermedium rec. 001). In Phase 2 a multi-media performance was produced live and broadcast on radio in March 2000 at the Samuel Beckett/Bruce Nauman exhibition in the Vienna Kunsthalle.

Phase 3 continues the gradual transformation of Beckett's prose into different media forms: part 3 as an idea, compositional approach and set of rules for an interactive online game. The basis for this is provided by Beckett himself, in a passage from Molloy: sucking stones. An activity which in Beckett is not so meaningless as it first appears; it involves thinking about life, about order and chaos – and the everlasting human longing to escape the entropy.

In Molloy, Beckett specifies the starting situation for the eccentric exercise. ONE: The player finds 16 stones on the beach. TWO: The player has 4 pockets (2 coat pockets and 2 trouser pockets) to keep the stones in. THREE: The player sucks all 16 stones in succession to dampen his hunger pangs without forgetting any of the stones or sucking any one twice.

In accordance with Beckett's rules, Internet users can select and combine online a number of so-called Beckett tapes with recordings and material from phases 1 and 2 of the project.

Online concept: Christoph Pingel / ZKM Karlsruhe Institute for Net Development
The end result of this interactive game is a network-generated radio mix following the rules of Beckett's sucking-stones sequence and selection criteria of the online users with the material of the recordings from phases 1 and 2.

Klaus Buhlert
composer, author, director; 1980/81 at the Computer Music Studio of MIT in Cambridge (USA); 1983-1986 guest professor for electronic and computer music at the Technical University of Berlin; since 1986 his own production studio; awards include Radio Play of the Year for Hotels (BR 1995), Will it be a likeness (hr 1996); lives in Berlin

BR/ZKM/DLR/intermedium 2