7 artists perform for 7 hours in 7 glass cages, separated from each other, isolated, protected from the outside world. The audience is given the chance to experience individual art and sound works in their making, to become a part of this process through their own existence, through pure presence. THE GLASS CAGE offers the performers the opportunity to explore and develop their art and to use their isolated, yet visible space. 
 

THE GLASS CAGE deals for 7 hours with the question of whether and how one can exist in an isolated area. This work was created years before Corona and has in turn taken a new direction through Corona. 
 

7 transparent cages are located in one room. In an open eighth cage is installed surveillance system. All actions are video monitored, the sounds and noises are monitorvized. The microphones are open all the time, everything is recorded. Cables lead to a control station where everything is registered. 
 

The 7 symbolizes the human being and is the sum of three and four, of ratio and soul on one side and body and emotion on the other. In the number symbolism the three stands for the triad, for a being unit of three persons. The four symbolizes the four basic elements of all being: earth, water, air and fire. 
 

7 chord fragments and chord elements form elements or states. Partly these not predetermined tonal structures are seven-voiced, partly monophonic, partly polyphonic, partly silence prevails. 

There is no prescribed dramaturgy or score to be followed and only one stage direction: No rules! 
 

The 7 hours performance takes place without interruption and without pause. Out of nothing a state emerges staged by instruments, voices, sounds, movement. Individual voices circle, disintegrate into fragments, swell and diminish again. The aleatoric is used consciously. Each element, which appears again and again in new, partly randomly emerging tones, can break and a new state can emerge. 

The musicians are living sculptures, noisemakers and storytellers, they do not act as an ensemble, but develop individually, independently, completely freely. 
 

Intelligent personal surveillance, motion profiling and facial recognition enable ever more extensive possibilities with almost limitless data processing. Corona acts as a catalyst for this development. 

Not only the distance between people is changing society, but also the flood of news and information. Fears and anxieties lead to the abandonment of tolerance, to demarcation and to the loss of pluralistic society and aspired equality. Fear of the future is spreading, leading to stagnation, desperate clinging to the status quo and preventing positive visions of the future. 
 

Google and Apple enter into a pact to fight Corona and emphasize giving the highest priority to user privacy and security. 

Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba and Facebook are collecting data. 

Movement profiles, control and verification systems of individuals are created. 

Increasing digital surveillance, as well as the growing interest of not only totalitarian states and tech giants in information about each individual is rapidly increasing. Corona enables an unimagined acceleration of development. It's all about control and surveillance. 

There is a threat of a total loss of privacy and the right to informational self-determination and a resulting adaptation of individuals to the behavior prescribed as normative by the state and the economy. 

Mariko Takahashi [Production, Neue Klangkunst gGmbH, Munich] 

Johannes Muggenthaler [Curator, Rathausgalerie | Kunsthalle der Landeshauptstadt München]