4:33:00 is a videowork by Roel Meelkop and Marco Douma. It has been created during the first Covid-19 era in march-april 2020.
About 20 years ago Roel Meelkop performed the piece 4:33 by the renowned avant-garde composer John Cage based on his own interpretation. Constantly aware of Cage’s theoretical musings, often elaborated in the form of scores, Roel Meelkop designed the piece to incorporate as many of Cage’s ideas about music as possible. It was intended to be released on a compilation, along with the interpretations of other sound artists. In the end, this did not happen and the piece has been figuratively dusting on a hard drive all these years. Recently, in some sort of isolation, Roel ran into it again and kneaded and stretched it into this 4:33:00 stretch. It is no coincidence that this piece took its final form during this period of partial quarantine, together with the video work of Marco Douma.
The work is in a constant flux, both sound and image, based on a few simple ingredients. It is a work to immerse yourself in, it can be heard and seen on monitor, multiple screens / projections and speakers, in small or large rooms, in different configurations. The work takes an emphatically long time to give the listener / viewer the chance to lose themselves completely in the sound and image. In addition, there is still a link with its illustrious predecessor 4:33. In that piece, Cage turned the listener’s expectations upside down by not letting the performing musician play, so that all the ambient sounds eventually formed the piece of music. In 4:33:00 that is not the case, but the listener is challenged in a different way to let go of all expectations and be open to what is happening right now.
It has been shown at the Bad—Inside Out—For You exhibtion in june 2020
