Aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:

»In 1833, British professional weaver and amateur engineer Sieglinde Stern invented the first electro-magnetic pickup and as a result, the first electrically amplified stringed instrument. One hundred years later, this invention enabled the production of the first electric guitar, which became one of the most popular and most frequently played instruments in the history of Western music. However, another 100 years later, no one plays this instrument anymore! What led to the rise and fall of the electric guitar? What is the nature of this instrument that had its suppressed origins in the handcraft of weaving and that mutated back into a loom during its decline? And who was its inventor Sieglinde Stern, who was erased from history and is only resurrected as Davis Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust?«

Why Frets? by Marko Ciciliani is a series of three works – a multimedia performance, a performance lecture, and an installation – that illuminate different aspects of this fictional history of the electric guitar from varying angles. The story is based on speculative fabulation – a deliberate re-invention of the past.

Rather than pursuing the idea of creating something new as an envisaging of the future, speculative fabulation and the rewriting of history proceeds from an examination of the conditions of how society and culture arrived at their present state. As an artistic practice of »arrière-art« – as opposed to »avant-art« –, rewriting the past offers a method of imagining what contemporary society might look like alternatively, and thus of creating a vision of a future. Or as Donna Haraway put it: »The open future rests on a new past« (1978).

In this way, the three individual works Why Frets? – Requiem for the Electric Guitar, Why Frets? – Downtown 1983 and Why Frets? – Tombstone – complement each other in the sense of a transmedia storytelling. Each of the individual works is a self-contained work, but taken as a whole, the three artworks cast different spotlights on the electric guitar, focusing on aspects such as techno-cultural developments, inscriptions of gender, or social values.