Next to the traditional arts such as painting and sculpture and next to the traditional instrumentarium of classical music, media art - that is, the combination of conventional artistic genres with new electronic media - has emerged. It took more than thirty years for this combination to evolve into an independent discipline that - although sometimes still handled with suspicion - meanwhile has been granted equal rights as "material" for exhibitions and concerts. After a difficult phase of technical experimentation and an equally exhausting road to public acceptance, we may well state now that media art has successfully reached a fruitful and actual competition with traditional visual arts and music.

The Karlsruhe musician and composer Sabine Schäfer belongs to a younger generation of artists that creates contemporary art from this diversity of genres with new self-confidence and as a self-evidence. But in comparison with the artistic career of - for example - Stephan von Hüne (winner of the Media Art Prize 1992) or the biography of Klaus Schöning, it becomes evident what the experimentation field of young media artists like Paul Garrin (winner of the Media Art Prize 1992) or Sabine Schäfer is based upon: They are research and communication pioneers on one hand, educated, highly specialized "jugglers" on the other side. The new tools and instruments of media art have been discovered and tested and are now ready for application. They have become just means to an end, another tool facilitating artistic expression.

As a musician, Sabine Schäfer plays the keyboard of the electronic instrumentarium, and her media art represents a modern and refined sound and space experience. The substance and relevance of her work is essentially based upon three hings: a solid artistic education as a pianist at the Musikhochschule Karlsruhe with Günther Reinhold (degree 1984), followed by a study in composition with Mathias Spahlinger and Wolfgang Rihm (master degree 1992) and finally a subtle curiousity and an affinity for experimentation with multimedia projects. Out of this connection, a diversity of concerts, compositions and actions were produced over the last ten years that have gradually broadened her artistic horizon and her experience potential. As early as in the early eighties, Sabine Schäfer produced electronic music, studying it on an artistical as well as a scientific level. Fascinated by the discovery of surprising sounds and tonal colours and new techniques of playing, improvisation with electronic instruments and devices was always most important to her. With this affinity for playing and backed up by her musical education and the influence of experimental rock music, she almost inevitably got involved in founding a formation herself. The group "PANTHA RHEI", with Helmut Bieler-Wendt on violin and bariton violectra and Sabine Schäfer on piano and synthesizer, was active in the period between 1984 and1991 and mainly performed interdisciplinary projects. The musical program - actually experimental improvisation, or conceptual compositions - was constantly redefined by temporary cooperation with other musicians , visual artists, poets, actors, and dancers. Among these works are KARSLRUHEBERLINKARLSRUHE, a dance performance with Maria Barth in 1986, and "microchrome I", a performance with the painter Sibylle Wagner in 1988.

The years 1990 to 1991 are described by Sabine Schäfer as a turning point in her creative life; she increasingly focuses on solo activities, without losing sight of interdisciplinary resources and the creative potential of cooperation. It is a discovery on two parallel tracks: on one side, there is a concentration on the classical instrumentarium of her education, on the other side the growing indepence of electronic technology as an artistic medium.

Grants from several different institutes enabled Sabine Schäfer to study computer control mechanisms for pianos, and so she developed "Music for piano solo and computer controlled grand piano". This work was produced at the Bösendorfer Company in Vienna and first performed in September 1992. It essentially consists of a duet between a pianist and a computer controlled piano, dealing with the space between the subjective limits of the pianist's playing technique and the objective limitations related with the mechanics of the instrument. It is not a contest comparable to a chess game with a chess computer; rather, the computer piano maintains its role as an accompanist.. It provides - though sometimes in heavy dynamic changes - the foundation for the part of the pianist, a wonderful synergy in the ancient dialogue between man and machine, or a fruitful synthesis of art and technology - that pair of opposites that has so often been referred to. On the other hand, Sabine Schäfer articulates the state of her artistic evolution in purely artificial sound environments. They are based on reports in observation psychology and physiology and are performed along with their very adequate translation into optical effects. "TopoPhonien" is the name for a cycle of works Sabine Schäfer produced over the last three years. Instead of describing a place in topology, it makes a place resound in Schäfer's topophony (a word derived from the greek topos for place, space, room and phone for sound, tone, noise). It is not just the sound inside a room, but the movement of sound in the room with the aim of adding a three-dimensional perception of space to the music. To achieve this, the only tools to employ are the ones offered by media technology; for only electronic devices offer the possibility of separating the production of the sound (the computer) from the place where it is heard (i.e. the loudspeaker), whereas with traditional instruments, these two events are always directly connected.

The TopoPhonien, sound environments, consist of installations of several loudspeakers, grouped and connected in accordance with the properties of the room. With complex hard- and software, developed by Sukandar Kartadinata, the movement of the sound, or the music, is controlled, creating the aspired sensation of depth in a given room. Sabine Schäfer makes a distinction between so-called "traversable sound-bodies", in which the visitor causes additional hearing sensations as he moves through the room, deciding himself what to listen to and for how long - and a "concertante sound installation", which means that the audience is seated and experiences the designed motion of the sounds within a certain configuration of loudspeakers.

Sabine Schäfer developed and performed several different TopoPhonien, each time with respect to the architectural context and in combination with other media such as light, image and other musical instruments. Installations like "TopoPhonicZones" in three rooms of the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe, with Hens Breet and Werner Cee (November 1992), "TopoPhonicSpheres", an installation of 16 loudspeakers with a computer grand piano at the Deutsches Hygienemuseum in Dresden (June 1993), and recently "The Spiritual Location of Sound", another installation for 16 speakers with a lighting design of Hens Breet, in the Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg (September 1993).

In all of these works, electronic music has become "room music", dealing with and composed especially for the acoustic properties and the atmospheric substance of the surrounding ambience. The simultaneous and conceptual presence of the architecture with light, music and time create an extraordinary synaesthetic experience. Source: Reprinted from: H.Klotz/M.Roßnagl (Hrsg.), Medienkunstpreis 1993 (cantz Verlag Stuttgart 1993) S.93ff. (abbreviated).