(c​)​ovid’s metamorphoses

With a wide range of work by sound artists and musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers and visual artists, @ovid’s Metamorphoses uses the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching consequences as an instrument for change, artistic and otherwise. A play on experiment across various fields of artistic practice, all the featured work revolves around ideas of transmission and inspiration, conjuring up a massive body of vital, daring and unashamedly avant-garde artistic expression.

@ovid’s Metamorphoses is a project initiated by Bernd Herzogenrath, professor of American literature and culture at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, and sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek. It features contributions from artists from the worlds of film, sound art and music, writing, visual art and photography, intent on upsetting the idea behind Ovid’s Metamorphoses — metamorphosis and progress through violence — and on defining the COVID-19 epidemic as a possible counterbalance to the myths underlying Western culture. Running through all the work presented here is the idea of playfulness as a fundamental artistic act. Infection and transmission allow for an artistic practice that leaves behind the myths that have defined Western culture for centuries.

@ovid’s Metamorphoses features an incredible number of sound pieces, films, texts, photographs, drawings, comics and paintings produced by a host of artists working at the vanguard of their respective fields. An intertextual play on beauty and meaning makes for pieces that often get lost in transmission and dwell in an existence beyond the common aesthetic and moral definitions that run through our culture. All the participating artists have exchanged ideas and pieces, fading out myths by way of the game of Broken Telephone. Through the interplay of infection and information, of information chains and sources of infection, new meanings spread in spaces defined and determined by all the artists.

The (c)ovid’s metamorphoses box contains seven CDs, two data DVDs with short films, and a 200-page full-colour book with texts, photographs, drawings and paintings. Neither the music nor any of the other work in the box is available digitally.