Interview with a Whispering Table

Right. If you don't remember what Dominik was like, I can tell you he had short reddish hair, a nice beard, a big German nose, didn't talk that much and liked sushi.

I had a very informal interview with the Whispering Table’s Dominik Schumacher. We mostly talked while walking the streets, so I do not remember the order of questions or answers anymore. Just trying to piece together a meaningful whole here. The other members weren’t available because of various other deadlines, teaching etc. It seemed to be common practice for them to send the documentation of each finished piece to every possible contest in search of publicity.

He told me the whole project took three months or so - originally the museum would have liked the piece to be made in two but obviously it was too soon. They ended up working huge amounts of overtime, but only because the project was meaningful and fun for them. The budget was around 30 000 euros, which covered the materials but in the end didn’t cover the work hours they spent on the piece.

The rituals covered were decided by the museum - apparently the whole exhibition was about the same rituals. They interviewed as many people as they could for the rituals, but they were reproduced in the installation as four big stories told by a single person from each culture. He wouldn’t name any single source of inspiration, saying that they just researched a lot and took bit from here and there, doing brainstorming with the help of physical visual bulletin boards and the like.

I was interested about the dishes’ materials and asked if they were stoneware. Dominik told me they had experimented with ceramics but had then discounted the material - or more accurately the burning process - as too fickle, and had instead used a man-made wood base and a finishing laquer that mimicked stoneware glaze to get the same feeling as in the real thing. The dishes lasted well in the museum, and there are presently only small scratches here and there where the children have tried to leave their mark in this world.

They made three prototypes of the piece, one functional, which only covered the device, one visual, which I assume was in 2D (he didn’t tell), and one final before the actual dishes. On the opening day the piece didn’t actually work perfectly and, with fixing, was only in good working order two weeks after the opening. They did get a lot of positive feedback for the piece, the museum liked the result very much. The audience reacted with some shyness to touch the piece at first, but when they got into it, they found it fun enough to stay for a while.

The device itself was built by Dominik, and I tried to ask him whether he had any ideas on how a collection of them could be used in practice, but I probably asked the wrong questions and he was a man of few words, so he just said that they could probably be used for anything (with a suitable software). Well of course, but that is not an answer!

Dominik didn’t think of the piece as art, which kind of took me by surprise. He was adamant that as it is a means of communicating information it does not qualify as art because, and I quote, “Art just is”. I adamantly disagree, but I suppose it might be because he studied communication design and other non-art programmes that he feels a piece has to be a mystery to be art.