Trimpin

Trimpin (born Gerhard Trimpin) (b. 1951) is a German born kinetic sculptor, sound artist, and musician currently living in Seattle, Washington, United States.

Trimpin's work integrates sculpture and sound across a variety of media including fixed installation and live music, theater, and dance performance. His works are known to be electromechanically actuated by embedded microcontrollers that communicate digitally through MIDI.

Trimpin grew up in Istein, now part of Efringen-Kirchen, near the French and Swiss borders. He is a native speaker of Alemannisch and the son of a brass and woodwind player. As a child he had access to old brass instruments to experiment with. He played brass instruments himself, but developed an allergy to metal that affected his lips and made him give up playing. Trimpin's father treated him to spatial musical experiences, playing at some distance in the German woods, and young Trimpin experimented with old radios and with cutting apart and recombining elements of musical instruments. He studied at the University of Berlin.

One early project in Berlin used a balancing clown figurine to play a wire recording of speech. The wire was stretched across a room and tilted up and down while the figurine rode the wire and played it, backwards and forwards. The history of his work recapitulates much of the history of data and sound storage technology. Prior to the availability of MIDI, Trimpin developed his own protocol for computer storage of music.

In 1980 Trimpin moved to America because he needed access to old, used technological components, which were difficult to find in Europe; he settled in Seattle because it "sounded like a nice place to live". In the 1980s, he worked one month per year fishing in Alaska to support his work.

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