“Occular Witness” is a series of installations that deal with light and seeing, and thematicize light in both a physical and metaphorical sense as a bearer of information and meaning. All of these experiments attempt to come to terms with questions of representation in a world of information glut and overproduction. Each model is set up as an optical problem in which the emission and absorption of light trigger reactions both by the machine’s systems of sensors as well as on the part of human observers, the “eyewitnesses”. (aec)
O.K Centrum fuer Gegenwartskunst, Linz, Austria
Project within the ARS-Electronica.
www.arijana.net
www.aec.at
www.ok-centrum.at

Passagen05, Kunsthaus Rhenania, Cologne, Germany
16 PET Wasserflaschen sind freischwebend im Raum verteilt. Der Besucher kann durch Berühren das Gehörte fühlen, die Kunststoffflaschen funktionieren hierbei als Membran. Die Raum-Klang-Installation “elementos vibrantes” entstand in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Komponisten und Musiker Rainer Berger.

Seit vielen Jahren sammelt die Künstlerin ausrangierte, alltägliche, kuriose Gegenstände, Sprüche und Darstellungen. Sie alle erzählen Geschichten. Patrizia Marchese begibt sich auf Spurensuche in der Alltagswelt anderer Menschen. Aus ihrem umfangreichen Arsenal arrangiert sie die Fragmente und Fundstücke unbekannter Leben, inszeniert Ausgesondertes in neuen Zusammenhängen. So wird das Spiel mit “kunstfreien Objekten” zusammenhängend erzählt. In kleinen Schaukästen werden fiktive Momentaufnahmen des Trivialen wie Modelle zu Bühnenbildern und Schauspielszenen präsentiert. In Rauminszenierungen, vergrößerten Guckkästen mit lebensgroßen, plastischen Kunstwesen werden die Betrachtenden Teil der Installation.
Kunsthaus Rhenania, Cologne, Germany, Passagen 2005

A standing wave (stationary wave) remains in a constant position. This phenomenon can occur because the medium is moving in the opposite direction to the wave, or it can arise in a stationary medium as a result of interference between two waves traveling in opposite directions.
Many Thanks to Daniel Palacios Jiménez and his interactive installation ‘Waves’ within the Ars Electronica 2006 (project description see media).

Vinyl-killer model-auto turntables equipped with a needle and a small VHF transmitters. The sound comes from a set of radios that receive the signal transmitted by the vinyl-killers. Additional radios on a circling toy train move through the different transmitter frequencies, thus permanently altering their sound and making the range and order of the frequencies visible. The vinyl-killers circle around on specially prepared loop records, whose loops initially contain “digital silence”; another essential feature is that the vinyl-killers are battery-operated, so they slow down during the installation. All of this makes Yokomono an unstable, incalculable system, in which distortion and erosion, the obliteration and destruction of the sound are part of the concept. Project within the ARS-Electronica, O.K Centrum fuer Gegenwartskunst, Linz, Austria. jz
www.staalplaat.org

Kunstaktion – “Verrichtungsbox für Scham und Trauer”, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Was wir sehen, was wir anderen zeigen, was wir an die Oberfläche lassen, sind die Eigenschaften und Gefühle, die gesellschaftsfähig sind: Erfolg, Glück, Macht. Unter der Oberfläche liegen Misserfolg, Glücklosigkeit und Ohnmacht, so führt Gregor Aigner in die Kunstaktion ein. Auch die “Verrichtungsbox für Scham und Trauer” liegt unter der Oberfläche genauer in der Kanalisation Frankfurts.
www.gregoraigner.de

Control over a human subject is turned over to a fully automatic system. The setup on witch this experiment is being run is an abstrcted assembly line on which electrical muscle stimuli deprive the human being of control over his own body.
A commissioned work by Ars Electronica, Composition: David Gottschalk

Lightpaintings

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany
Die raumgreifenden Arbeiten des belgischen Künstlers Jan de Cook stellen zwar eine strenge und geometrische, doch ebenso geheimnissvolle und verführerische Landschaft dar, die den Blick des Besuchers in immer neue Ecken, immer neue Räume lenkt.
Das für die Schirn geschaffene “Denkmal 7” ist zugleich eine De- und Rekonstruktion des Kunsthauses das sich dem Besucher en passant zugänglich macht.

One hundred portraits of international media artist and visitors of the O.K. “Centrum for Contemporary Art”, Linz (Austria) within the Ars Electronica 2006.
Jürgen Zeller (GER) in collaboration with Mario Brucculeri (GER)

If you like to see the single images, please use the tag below the picture. Each serie has its own master-tag, like: LNZ_06_OK_Interfaces_0X (X = 01-09)

Within the „NIZZA TRANSFER“-Project the graffiti artists KOAST and MERLIN transformed a DIN A4 sized drawing by Stefan Wieland in a 60 qm sized mural. Staatlichen Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Städelschule Frankfurt/M., Germany

A series of installations by Petra Eichler and Susanne Kessler (Germany), October 2005 – December 2006.
In the center of the city, Petra Eichler and Susanne Kessler, are creating spaces in which silence becomes an experience in itself. The resulting atmosphere projects a stillness on the observer, both mentally and physically.
Four different ‘sounds of silence’ will be created over a period of a year, each lasting an evening, an afternoon, or several days.
Each respective installation works with the location and character of the vacant property.
www.soundsofsilence.de
Book: »THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT OUR SOUNDS OF SILENCE« / Petra Eichler & Susanne Kessler / Distribution: Buchhandlung Walther König / ISBN 978-3-86560-021-9 / concept and design: desres design

A hybrid performance between dance, theater, and film, »Kammer/Kammer« stages an elaborate erotic economy of disjunctive doublings. The piece juxtaposes two homosexual love stories – a young man bemoaning the frustrations and inequalities of his relationship with his rock star lover, and Catherine Deneuve as a university professor entangling herself in romantic fantasies about a girl in her class – adapted from the novel Outline of My Lover by Douglas A. Martin and the essay Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft) by award-winning poet and scholar, Anne Carson. In essence, »Kammer/Kammer« is a live recording of a film that at once disables the viewer’s access to the substantive events of the performance while simultaneously constructing the appearance of an even more intimate relationship to the live than the bare stage would offer. The performed action is often perceived in interstitial glimpses as it occurs behind continually shifting walls and is mediated through highly-choreographed camera movement, unusual frame compositions, and real-time editing of video sequences dispersed throughout the space on vibrant wide flat-screen video monitors. The technological spectacularity is countered by the ultra-low tech materiality of bare mattresses upon which dancing bodies confront one another in swift and complex kinetic disfigurations. The radical multiplicity of dislocated space and movement in »Kammer/Kammer« nonetheless attains a powerful coherence in the minds of the spectators.
www.theforsythecompany.de

Artist Statement: My current series, San Francisco in Jell-O®, consists of photographs and videos depicting San Francisco landscapes that I’ve cast in Jell-O. To produce the landscapes, I start by fabricating scale models of the architectural elements – like the Transamerica Pyramid or the Palace of Fine Arts – out of balsa wood or foam core. I then make molds from those models, which I use to cast the buildings. My process resembles constructing a movie set, or building a sculptural installation: I add hand-painted backdrops and elements like mountains and model trees, or even dry ice to simulate fog. Finally, I light the scenes dramatically from below. Each area of the city is a different Jell-O sculpture.
www.lizhickok.com

Truth is the pseudonym of an urban intervention artist. In 2004 he started the project Truthtag. You can call it a »constructivist mashup«. He use product wastes, like PVC or XPS, and recycle them. The form is strongly refreshed with elements of graffiti, vectorial graphics and architecture.
The installations are attacking building surfaces like parasites. The aim of the project is to create new meanings around existing architectural tissue. Truthtag is a multi leveled urban experiment.
www.truthtag.com

Parasite is an independant projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads. Using the speed of the train as parameter for the projected content, the projection starts with the train moving inside a tunnel. These tunnels bear something mystic – most people usually have never made a step inside any of those tunnels. Confusing the routine of your train-travellingjourney, your habits and perception the projections Parallel Worlds – making use of Parasite – allow you a glimpse into a different world full of surrealist imagery.
www.thegreeneyl.de
www.fredericeyl.de

Since 10 years the dutch artists Theo Jansen creates kinetic sculptures, a combination of engineering and art. The large, complex works remembers to skeletons of animals and they are able to walk using the wind on the cost of the Netherlands. Theo Jansen call his »beach creatures« Strandbeests.
Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.
www.strandbeest.com
lecture: www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/162
Book: Theo Jansen: The Great Pretender, English, Pubisher: 010 Uitgeverij (August 2007), ISBN-10: 9064506302, ISBN-13: 978-9064506307

In 1990 Italo Lanfredini created a spiry sculpture made of terracotta colored concrete on a hill near Castel di Tusa (Sicily) .
The labyrinth is entitled »Arianna« and symbolizes the birth of a human being. »Labirinto di Arianna« is part of the outdoor art park »Fiumara d´Arte« (arroyo of art) in the north of Sicily.
37°54’0.94” N; 14°18’42.29” E

In the near future a new city district will be developed on the area of the former harbour of Offenbach/Main (GER). Wiebke Grösch and Frank Metzger realised a permanent light installation on the site.
By labelling of the harbour area as »Universum« (universe) the site is defined as a space of possibilities. The area becomes a projection screen for the coming urban changes and also refers to the history of the district. »Universum« was also the name of an former cinema, which existed near the harbour area until the early 1990s. The »Universum« was the largest and most glamorous movie theatre in the city and at the time of its opening in 1956 also one of the most modern cinemas in Germany. The cinema and the harbour had to close because of the changing social and economic conditions.
Neon sign on galvanised steel poles
Height: 3.50 meters, width: 6.00 m.
Character Height: 1.05 m / 0.65 m
www.groeschmetzger.de

»The ornament generator« is an oversized kaleidoscope. Transitoriness and perpetual renewal as well as the power of childish experience lend this sculpture its quality. In the apparatus mundane objects become valuable pieces of a picture. Simplistic principles generate multi-layered, artistic processes.
The kinetic sculpture was presented within the Light-festival »Luminale 2008« in the “Satellite” of the Gallery Anita Beckers, Frankfurt/M.

»72 SECONDS RED« by Gregor Aigner (temporarily Stéphane Bittoun)
The detoxication center for power abuse is located in Frankfurt/Main, Petersstraße 2. Potentates and people who abuse power in other ways are sucked, their red power elixir is filtered in the back of the center and after that is feeded over a pipeline in the red stoplight in front of the center. Everyone loves to stop at the red light for a good cause at Petersstraße 2 in Frankfurt/Main which has a very long red phase of 72 seconds and is therefore one of the most potent red stoplights of the city.
The work was presented within the lighting festival »Luminale 2008«, Frankfurt/M. (GER)
www.gregoraigner.com

»MONOLINE« by Berit Greinke and Daniel Weiß (sound) is about the interplay of pencil drawings and sound generation.
»The invention not only enables one to observe and to read a drawing, but also to listen to it.
The artist‘s work is stylized as both laboratory research and work in progress, whilst the aesthetic spectrum of the drawing is enhanced by an acoustic dimension.« Tristan Pranyko
»I begin the drawings in the upper left-hand corner and end in the lower right-hand one. I painstakingly protect the sheets of paper. I vacuum up the graphite dust with a hand-held vacuum cleaner so as not to smudge the drawings when blowing the dust off. The more often I make the same hand movements, the cleaner and more precise the drawings will be. My aim is to get a precisely calculated value from the drawing – but my hand drawing balks against this technoid demand.
The formula for drawing involves no scientific precision, the resistance values achieved are in the range of hundreds of thousands of ohms. But still adhering to my self-imposed scientific rules, I obstinately continue to draw – a minimalist aesthetic emerges.
In the exhibition, the drawings finally go out of control. Their impulsively independent existence becomes evident: they react vociferously to the number of visitors in the room, to people’s proximity, they hiss in rainy weather or receive radio broadcasts. It is roaringly loud.« Berit Greinke
www.monoline.org

Street Art in Strassbourg, France, May 2008 – There were numbers of little boxes and neon red “love killing” underpants focused my eyes on to street art in Strassbourg.
The photographic result of my three days and two nights field excursion is a kind of zoom in on the Alsatian slang of urban artwork. Lousy tags, serial home printed stickers and fancy stencil graffiti, in a kind of anonymous city exhibition. Ultra dynamic, illegal and free of charge.

A frozen moment of falling melted metal symbolizing a rain drop by Mona Kim, Todd Palmer, Olga Subiros and Simon Taylor. A sculptural part of the exhibition »Agua para la Vida« within the World Expo 2008.
www.programcollective.com

How does Turin speaks? How does Turin feels?
Some impressions of street art and – culture of the business and cultural center of northern Italy.

»Liquid Space 6.0« is an interactive tridimensional sculpture, reacting to human behavior.
The object becomes bigger, smaller and brighter when visitors approach it. In addition, colors and sounds coming from the object’s body change according to the visitors movement.
Daan Roosegaarde’s sculpture is a fusion of mechanism, electronics, LEDs and sound.
The artwork is still presented within the exhibition “minimum interface” at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM], November 1st till February 8th, Yamaguchi, Japan.
www.studioroosegaarde.net
www.ycam.jp

She developed the complex work in the year 2005. Since this time she arranged a constantly increasing sculpture from more than a half million handput white plastic cable straps.

CURIOUS IMPLANTATION is an installation that transgresses space representing a hybrid creation made of plastic cable straps that the artist has combined in an unconventional and quite personal way. Its dimensions are extended through costumes, videos, photographies and transformation through interaction. The translucent, ephemeral but also transient characteristics of the artist’s favorite materials and shapes that are represented in this installation can be regarded as a metaphor for the sphere between reality and absurdity. The artist’s aim is to use synthetic waste products other than originally intended. More than a half million white plastic cable straps have been combined manually to create a 50 qm sculpture as well as costumes that mutate into utopian formations and hybrid creations.
CURIOUS IMPLANTATION represents a hybrid creation between nature and technology.
Its appearance is amorph, partly moved by human beings and partly by technology. It is an odd installation resembling a scene of a science fiction movie.
When entering the gallery space the viewer finds a monstrous creation.
The space and the sculpture are white thus visually blending into each other.
The surface that appears organic at first sight turns out to be filigran-structured and synthetic when looking closer. Tightly woven white nylon cable ties cover the whole surface of the sculpture. When the viewer gets closer the sculpture starts moving getting alive. The installation changes from a surreal artistic landscape to a strange creature that breathes. The appearance of the cable-ties-implanted surface creates a desire to touch it. At first sight the white sculpture seems to be soft like fur or a meadow. However when touching the surface the viewer experiences an irritation through the bristly resistance of the material. The indirect lighting makes the sculptue even softer looking and therefore emphasizes the contrast to the touching experience. This is similar with the costumes.
They appear light and soft, the cable ties resemble feathers or soft ribbons.
When being moved they rustle like multi-layerd taffeta. However they are heavy when being worn, the cable ties scratch and sting. When undressing their inner creatures come to light: The cast off skin of a fable creature, the baleen of a whale, cuttlefish, mussels, corals, ticks or totally unknown creatures.
www.nicole-knauer.de

TOTART is an art project series. This time about duels. A duel between a shooter and a dummy was simulated – with live bullets.
The public order office approved this project under one condition: to cut the head off the dummy. Don’t shoot on a thing that looks like a human being. A good rule. But does a dummy without head doesn’t look like a human being anymore? And isn’t it much more brutal to behead the dummy like a terrorist than to manufacture some tops with bullet holes?
The project shows one of millions of farcial regulations of our authorities in a very cruel way. The t-shirts, longsleeves and hoodies of the inferior dueler were sold at a happening. All the sound effects used in the TOTART movie are original sounds from the shooting. Some sound like big waves, some like the snoring of a public servant. The quotes are from “rules of duels” published in 1871. Rules that are very contemporary in times of only winners and losers and nothing inbetween. watch movie
www.gregoraigner.de

FINANZDECKEN – IRRITATE MODERN
“Wie sehen die Finanzdecken inmitten der Krise aus, wie unterschiedlich, wie stark, wie dünn sind sie?
Sorgen die Finanzdecken der Menschen noch für einen guten Schlaf?”

We like to keep a close eye on our neighbours, now that their wealth has diminished or even vanished completely. But instead of looking at people’s bank accounts, the “Finanzdecken” project looks into the waste paper bins of the city’s different neighbourhoods. Used newspapers tell new stories and offer exciting perspectives. We started in the Westend of Frankfurt. Nobody reads the business pages in this (wealthy) part of town. Why? “Finanzdecken” holds up a mirror and draws comparisons. Does recession change people or do people actually yearn for it? Are we now clever, capable and willing enough not to repeat this crisis? Do we learn from our mistakes? Or is the error in the system? It seems to be in the human system. “Finanzdecken” are tragicomic witnesses of greed, poor judgement, lost property and a wealth of newly-won insights. The zigzag seams which sew the “Finanzdecken” together reflect the zigzag course of the stock exchanges, the ups and downs of human psychology. The downturn keeps us together. What goes down must come up. Zigzag, that’s us.

“In mehreren Stadtteilen der Eurostadt Frankfurt wurden die Finanzteile von gebrauchten Zeitungen gesammelt und zu Finanzdecken in einer Größe von jeweils ca. 1,20×1,70 Meter zusammen genäht.
Derzeit werden ausgestellt: “Finanzdecke Westend”, “Finanzdecke Gutleut”, “Finanzdecke Dichterviertel”, “Finanzdecke Ostend”, “Finanzdecke Bockenheim”, “Finanzdecke Sachsenhausen”, “Finanzdecke Ginnheim”, “Finanzdecke Hausen”.
Weitere “Finanzdecken” sind in Planung.”

www.gregoraigner.de

Rundgang 2010

The Städelschule opens its doors to the public for its annual Rundgang from 12-14 February, where the 167 fine arts and architecture students will be showing their current work in their studios.

Städelschule (main building), Dürerstrasse 10: the classes of Judith Hopf, Christa Näher, Michael Krebber, Mark Leckey, Willem de Rooij and Ben van Berkel

Städelschule