Peaches (since 1997)

Peaches is a multi-faceted collaboration between composer Stefan Hakenberg and artist Theo Lipfert

Stefan's three movement composition Like Juicy Peaches is the starting point for each of the works. Recorded in 1997 in Fontainebleau, France, Like Juicy Peaches is a composition for four cellos in which the cello players also speak. The score is available from TONOS Musikverlag.

In 1999 Theo Lipfert created a video interpretation of the Like Juicy Peaches recording. In the video Lipfert overlaps images of rainy streets with floating airplane wreckage, backhoes and dumptrucks with football audiences, and tai chi dancers with cheering youngsters. The video was first shown in 1999 at the opening of Art Frankfurt and is available from Galerie Skala, in Cologne, or directly from the artists.

The year 2000 saw a new direction for the Peaches Project: Peek at Speaking Peaches, an interactive computer kiosk in which the "player" controls music and video. The player chooses content for two video layers by clicking with the mouse on buttons. Clicking on buttons also allows the player to construct original music. In the third movement, the viewer can record a "tongue twister" by holding down the mouse and speaking into the microphone. His or her voice is added to the music. The kiosk was first exhibited at the now closed MetroArts gallery in Salt Lake City. The program itself is available from the artists - it requires a Mac with at least 300mb of free harddrive space and 256mb of ram to run.

During the following year, 2001, at the TOTAL Museum in Seoul's Pyongchang-dong Stefan and Theo were able to present a new and bigger form of Like Juicy Peaches which they called 21 Peaches. The video is mixed on the fly and the music consisted of five movements. The two new movements located inbetween the three original ones elaborate on the tonguetwister motif from the end of the original third movement (ad lib) and involves a conductor and participating audience. The originally second movement (An Accumulation of Motifs by Coleman Lindsley) was rewritten and expanded.