On January 16, 2013, a package addressed to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was shipped from London. Its destination was the embassy of Ecuador, the very same place where Assange has been granted protection as a refugee. The parcel was equipped with a camera that every ten seconds took pictures of its journey through a hole in the box. These pictures were immediately posted to a Twitter account via a mobile phone that was also inside the parcel. Sender was the Swiss artist group !Mediengruppe Bitnik who described the their work as “system_test” and “a live mail art piece”. After 32 nerve-wrecking hours of tracking the package online, a time during which most pictures were simply black, the shipment reached its destination. Assange, being the unbroken political activist he is, used the offered stage for publicity: “Hello World”, “Welcome to Ecuador”, and requests such as “Free Bradley Manning”, “Free Jeremy Hammond” and “Justice for Aaron Swartz” or “Keep fighting” could be read on small index cards which he held in front of the camera hidden inside the parcel. Julian Assange crowned this mail art experiment with a live performance.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik are interested in media systems, mediatized realities and live media. They are interested in control and surveillance systems, and undermine the underlying technology by revealing and reversing its mechanisms through ingenious art gestures. In 2009, they seized control over the signals of two surveillance cameras of the Zurich police department. The footage of the cameras was transferred directly into the exhibition space. Thus, the visitors could see a live-stream of the outer entrance as well as the reception of the police station. The controller turned into the controlled. In 2012, they manipulated surveillance cameras of London's subway stations with fake film material that sent challenges to play chess to the monitors. SURVEILLANCE CHESS reverses the mechanism of a control system, and demands equality through play. The basic idea behind DELIVERY FOR MR. ASSANGE is a questioning of transparency in contemporary democratic societies. Who owns and controls information, and who has access to this information.

“We would love to know what's going on in the world” explains !Mediengruppe Bitnik and follows this postulate by their own artistic means. It was a matter of urgency that they contacted Assange.

Andrea Linnenkohl

Kurt Caviezel looks at the world through the lenses of webcams. The finger always on the trigger, he travels with the speed of light through the vastness of the Internet. His collection of screenshots is composed of more than three million pictures. The artist sorts these snapshots into series depending on areas of interest or motives, and sometimes these collections are exhibited in various big institutions around the globe. Yet, what does the virtual traveller see when the connection has been interrupted, the main season at the other end of the line is over or when the webcam has been subject to vandalism? There is a whole file of such phenomena in the artist’s archive. Arranged as image clouds, Caviezel shows a series of images that claim to be no image, or just placeholders. In NO VIDEO we see the signals of webcams that are not online.

And even if there is apparently nothing to see in these places in the world, there is indeed something to see. Most of the time, these are placeholders for the live image quickly superimposed by the operators of the webcams. Like a pop-up they cover up the view through the lens. Due to a short stay in the hospital, one writes an excuse that the camera urgently needs a reboot. Or the main season is over and instead of alpinists and snow conditions the world traveler sees a note that the camera has been shut down “during summer”. The stories that Kurt Caviezel collects from his expeditions are merely notes, sometimes they are very personal, sometimes bizarre explanations why there is nothing to see. The pictures that he saves tell something about the webcam operators, about their relationship to the cameras, as well as the use of language and text on the originating webpage in the various countries.

NO VIDEO presents the viewer images that claim to be mere placeholders or representatives of actual images. In this way, they say a lot about the role and perception of images. What the observers of the installation see is on the one hand really “no video” – it’s the frozen, lifeless condition of a video. But as the images are presented as prints, the assertion of not being an image becomes obsolete because the visitor is confronted with the classical presentation of a picture. Furthermore, what the viewer receives at home on the screen is, on a technical level, an image in the classic JPG data format.

NO VIDEO reflects upon the increasing sensory overload in a very calm and unexcited way. The image cloud that hovers on the wall is a cloud of stagnation, pause and looking inward. A cloud that invites the visitor to take a closer look, and that stirs up the fantasy at the same time. What would one see if the camera was sending live images? The answer is: Probably even less interesting and undisguised views of the world, free of secrets and speculation. Click, onward, next cam.

Lukas Thiele

250 kg of amassed film footage, real celluloid on a pile. For some, it is a memory formed from haptic and olfactory experience, for others, it is a relic from long bygone days. How long has it been for those that used to work with footage themselves? If they ever worked with “real” film, that is. Today, computer chips and hard disks are responsible for saving and reproducing memories. The soft and warm chemical colors of celluloid have been replaced by the cold, clear and high-contrast images of electronic media. Yet the desire for these old images has lingered on. Nowadays, one can download a diverse number of filters and programs onto one’s smartphone directly from the Internet, so that digital photographs and videos can gleam with the charming imperfections of the analog material – a strange world in intermediary stage.

Here however, the vintage footage offers an experience that differs from the one originally intended for the movie theater. There is no projection, instead the visitors can touch and play with the film. In a very real way, and not metaphorically speaking, the visitors can submerge into the film. They can experience it physically, dig through it, and hold a strip of film against the light to unravel its secrets. The stories told by the film footage are gone, but the FILMHAUFEN (pile of film) itself turns into a story. This kind of experience is different from the emotions that the original footage elicited in the audience. In this form of presentation, the emotions reach a new and physical presence, from which new experiences emerge. Here, fantasy is driving the visitors to take action where they usually are forced into passive consumption. The footage that used to exist and work unnoticed in hidden, small and dark projection rooms, is dragged into the spot light. It is not only a mediator, but very much the center of attraction, the star of the event.

The immaterial film is reduced to its material origin – the film strip. And still, the strips of film enchant the visitors and new stories emerge in their minds. In contrast to the cinema experience, these are different for each person in the audience. For some, the story may be absurd, for others it poses questions regarding the permanence and existence of art. Definition of value, the process of creating value or recycling may be possible topics for other visitors, and some may simply stare confused and delighted at the sheer mass of lost images. And yet others will just stand next to the pile and be happy to be reunited with the childhood companions of numerous wonderful hours in dark halls.

Thomas Fröhlich

Amidst an idyllic landscape of dunes stands the ruin of a house: overgrown with ivy, constructed from concrete, a lonely radar tower. The photographs taken by Renaud Duval in the French coastal town Loon-Plage in the region of Clipon seem to tell stories about the relics of a long-lost civilization. The history and present of this town are reflected in the multimedia installation CLIPON ARCHIVES.

In the seventies, a harbor was planned in this area and its neighboring cities. The consequences were forced eviction of the population and local farmers as well as the removal of the dunes. But the highly ambitious project was a failure. Nowadays, only architectonic remains of the planned harbor construction remind one of human intervention, and the rotting houses tell the stories of the exiled. The dunes slowly take back their original form. Plants grow over the decaying buildings that bear witness to the ghostly unfamiliarity and absence of people.

The photographs of Loon-Plage portrait the present not as a historic status quo, but rather as a hybrid intermediary stage of various impressions of time, which are still plainly visible in the landscape. The pictures depict a place that shows lost homes of evicted people and serves as a symbol for human hubris and a stage for nature that has been pushed back and reclaims its place. The presented objects and locations appear endangered in their existence. Their future is uncertain and their present is characterized by the past. CLIPON ARCHIVES thus drafts an atmospheric image of spatial manifestations of history.

Negative cases with handwritten notes refer to local sources in Duval’s complex archival and research work. Locations were inscribed in these cases, which contained photos of the landscape before it was changed by the industrial intrusion. Some of the places that Duval portraits in his photographs are based on the aforementioned notes on the negative cases.

Another part of the installation is a video. The projection shows a time exposure of the coastal area of Loon-Plage: day passes, night comes, wind blows over the dunes, the spray of the sea hovers over the sand. It seems like nothing is happening and yet, the consistent process of change in the seemingly everlasting sameness is visible in little details: the wind deforms the dunes and continues to cover up the ruins with sand. An audio track accompanies the visitor through the installation: The French singer Françoiz Breut reads a text that poetically reflects the interplay between nature and humans in Loon-Plage.

The extraordinary quality of Renauld Duval’s work lies not only within the sensitive multi-media documentation of the conditions of Loon-Plage, but in the fact that he looks at the state of change on both macro- and microcosm levels, in short and long time spans. CLIPON ARCHIVES examines the ambivalent relationship between humans and nature, between the ruling and the ruled in various constellations, without leaving the area of interest.

Ann-Charlotte Günzel

The installation THE TANK, THE MAN AND THE STREET deals with the students’ uprising in Beijing in 1989. One image of that situation has remained in the collective memory especially: a man in a white shirt opposes approaching governmental tanks, holding on to nothing but a plastic bag. Since then the Chinese state has repressed any debate on the topic by censuring existing pictures, films and texts.

And so does the presented work. The appearance of the white shirted man has been documented in mere fragments. Its full reconstruction is the first step of the installation. In a second step, the man in the white shirt is eliminated and only the tanks remain rolling. A third step masks them, too, leaving the street peacefully and undisturbed. The artist has instructed various Chinese post-production companies to execute this process of purging. – Disguise and opposition, two options of facing reality, two options to act.

Tilman Hatje

CONVERSATION PIECE is a special typology of the group pictorial narration – quite frequent during the 17th and 18th centuries – that Gabriela Golder takes as a model to create an audiovisual triptych. This genre embodies a tour along times, a metaphor of traditio that etymologically means “the passing of hands”. Thus, the work unfolds onto the motif of legacy, combining lowercase histories with political and social History – the History of art and the history of family.

Golder composes this video-installation by placing a grandmother on the left screen, played by Golder’s own mother – a militant in the Argentine Communist Party – wearing an emblematic red color. On the right screen, two girls – representing the woman’s granddaughters – read the Communist Manifesto like characters of the French Nouvelle Vague, who the grandmother eventually corrects. The set is structured by means of three different frames of the same scene. The central frame, with the pregnant depth of the countryside, shows the entire event that takes place in a very formal and elegant room, challenging any reference to domestic affairs with a fictional touch.

CONVERSATION PIECE then turns into a kind of manifesto or will. From the title to the staging, it recalls the aristocratic rococo world of the boudoir and the gallant parties of the 18th century, overshadowed by the French Revolution of 1789. The Communist Manifesto of 1848, which supported struggles and social rebellions throughout the 20th century, encountered its crisis at the end of the century. The present 21st century brings  – as a corollary – a small though not minor rescue of revolutionary memory.

Through Golder’s juxtaposition of generations, a political and social itinerary is traced – one both intimate and personal that undoubtedly stands out as a homage to her mother. Nevertheless, this route is not the only one the piece passes through.

In CONVERSATION PIECE, the artist transforms the reading of an emblematic text into a metaphor for the development of life. She emphasizes difficulties, doubts, mistakes; she points to the importance of accompaniment but also at the challenges and will needed to overcome drawbacks and carry on the task. The scene has a melancholic tone, drawing from the remnants of a time when political reflection was built upon certain roots, slowly disclosing the potential that exists at the point where an embodied thought and another, historical and more settled, crossover.

Graciela Taquini and Rodrigo Alonso

Monday, June 3, 2013. Fresh coffee is served. “Milk and sugar?” I will not be able to go straight to Vienna. Due to severe weather, the train will end in Passau. “We will inform you about connecting trains well in advance.” A short while later I am in Aschaffenburg. On the siding is the rusty Trans-Europe Express.  The rolling hills of the Spessart are covered in thick forest. The sky is cloudy. I think about my parents' farm where I often helped bring calves and kid goats into the world. I would watch them drink from their mother's udder and run across the pastures for the first time.

When I think of male lactation I cannot help but reflect upon the principle of fertility. I believe that we desperately need fruitful ideas, not only in our daily lives but also in art. The Main meanders through steep vineyards and through me. Its banks have burst. Blood, oxygen, nerve pathways, meridians, the lymphatic system; innumerable pathways run through the body and form a vital system full of openings and portals where exchange takes place. Milk is brought through the mammary ridge to the nipple, to nurse the infant. What a powerful principle this is that makes us what we are: “You and me baby ain't nothing but mammals so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel ... ”

“The situation in Passau is very tense.” “What does that mean? What's next?” “I cannot tell you anything right now. We don't even know if we can go all the way to Passau. I am also unable to tell you how you may proceed from there, but I will be sure to inform you well in advance.”

Ever since humans have traveled they have navigated using stars. The orbits the stars describe on their way through the universe helped them to determine their position. When it was cloudy, the men had to rely on their inner compass. In 1799, the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt embarked on a journey to the equinoctial region, the tropics of the so-called “New World.” In a village in Venezuela he discovered a farmer whose wife had fallen ill after giving birth. To calm his child the farmer held him against his chest. As a result of the stimulation of his nipple, the farmer was able to produce milk, and he nursed his son for five months.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we kindly ask you to remove all luggage and coats from unoccupied seats in order to provide seating for all passengers.” Suddenly I find myself sharing four seats and a table with a party of five; a family with three daughters has joined me. The children are whining. As I was about to read a book, I offer my laptop to them to watch “Simon's Cat.”

Humboldt's description of the farmer and further research into the subject of male lactation leaves little doubt that men are principally, even if in very few cases, able to nurse children. Humboldt didn't find this implausible and requested further studies. Until today, the phenomenon is mostly unknown and has never been subject to intensive research.

The three girls are happy. After half an hour, they close the laptop and thank me warmly. The father takes out a coloring book and a pink pencil case. His youngest daughter sits on his lap and paints in Princess Lillifee and some butterflies with glitter-pens.

Franz Christoph Pfannkuch

“You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.” (Barack Obama, 2013)

In June 2013, the American computer specialist and former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed top secret documents belonging to the United States Secret Service. He made public information on how the USA, together with allies such as Great Britain, have been secretly monitoring wide parts of the global internet and telecommunications – automated and without proof of a probable cause.

The eight spy programs known so far – among them “PRISM”, “XKeystore” and “Tempora” – deliver information about the day-to-day behavior of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Skype users by absorbing the data directly from the servers of the cooperating corporations. Other programs make it possible to read the data and locate the position of smartphones as well as targeting the infrastructure of the internet and other global information networks. Various tools are available to gather, pool and analyze global communication, invade outside networks or decode encrypted information. These tools are also used for reconnaissance of foreign satellite communication, spying on financial data, as well as the surveillance of international postal traffic and the Belgian telecommunication company Belgacom. Among the customers of Belgacom are the European Commission, the European Council, the European Parliament and NATO. The scandal intensified when it was made public that representatives of the European Union and even the center of the United Nations were wiretapped.

A world wide debate ensued and showed the public’s shaken trust in the status of the United States and Great Britain as democratic countries. The muted political reactions of many EU countries, especially the German government’s lack of a distinct political position, left many citizens feeling helpless in the face of overly powerful back-room politics.

Jörn Röder and Jonathan Prinay explore these issues in their installation 100% SECURITY: a small, nondescript office in which the complete traffic of an open public wireless network, installed for the duration of the exhibition, is printed out. Every page accessed by users, every password, every email is intercepted and sent through a printer. The installation is provoking and aims to create an awareness of the issues surrounding digital surveillance. Edward Snowden's revelations renewed interest in questions about the freedom of the internet, the intensifying abstraction between “me and the internet” as well as the uncertainty of the individual towards his or her responsibilities and rights. Governments should care for the security of their citizens, however, is constant surveillance lawful? If I am liable for my internet connection’s data stream does this mean that I have to monitor it? The installation also speaks within the context of art. The immediacy and simplicity of publicly printing out personal data enables a debate on a level beyond algorithms, cryptographic methods and data packages.

Joel Baumann

The inspiration for Frank Reimer's installation THE SITUATION ROOM is Pete Souza's now iconic photograph. Taken in the so-called “Situation Room” – the strategic control center in the White House – it captures President Obama and his national security team as they watch the killing of Osama bin Laden live on a screen.

The installation is designed like the set of a motion picture. Similar to movie props, Reimer builds the room's layout according to Souza's press picture and thus translates the photograph into a physical experience. Two white plasterboard walls describe the dimensions of the room, while the other two sides are left open. In the middle is a conference table with notebook computers made from cardboard positioned at every seat, and cups and documents distributed across it. At the end of the table is a heavy office chair; other chairs are placed around the room in no apparent order. The emblem of the US government decorates the rear wall. The scene is lit by spotlights. A camera films whatever is happening inside the set, and the image is streamed live to a screen in the front part of the installation.

Visitors are invited to move freely through the installation, and those who take up the offer become part of a reenactment. Using Souza's picture as a template, visitors can slip into the role of Obama and his government representatives, reconstructing the historic moment when the US government killed one of its biggest enemies. Visitors to the installation are filmed at exactly the same angle from which Souza took his photograph while the live feed appears on a monitor in the same place that the images of the special forces advancing on Osama bin Laden's grounds were displayed in the real “Situation Room.” In this way, the visitors turn into viewers of a second order. They see themselves from Souza's perspective: as actors in his picture. Reimer confronts visitors with an image of themselves in the place where Obama watched the execution of bin Laden.

The main theme of Reimer's closed-circuit installation is the role of the media in the “war on terror.” Those responsible for killing are not present, they do not engage directly in combat and instead watch a monitor. This mediation puts them at a distance; they become spectators of an act in which they have not been physically involved. Reimer confronts the viewer with questions about the moral implications of the increasing virtuality of western warfare – questions that also dominated the recent debates about the usage of drones in war. If the act of killing becomes abstracted through the distance of a screen while the perpetrator takes the role of a passive bystander, can he or she still feel responsible for his or her action? Our own mirror image, like that reflected back at the viewer in THE SITUATION ROOM, shows that our actions will ultimately fall back on us.

Nils-Arne Kässens

GESTUS : JUDEX unveils to the user what his eyes already see and his mind constantly processes, albeit not consciously. That fleeting moment when we perceive someone in a crowd – possibly even walking away – and we still recognize them. Neither attire nor face disclose their identity, it is their gesture. A pattern we have stored in our memory. Applied to film, this way of looking reveals a whole new vocabulary hidden in moving images, the pattern of vectors, the vector as a ‘symbolic form.’

In the installation we watch the computer's algorithm process and compare these vector patterns, and marvel at what our mind does far beyond the limits of consciousness. However, this knowledge can empower those who watch society in an effort to dominate it. Individuals are usually hard to track in large moving crowds. But if motion acts like a fingerprint, the analysis of surveillance videos taken from static cameras discloses an individual’s movement through a crowd, thus allowing us to be tracked at any time. With the knowledge that surveillance camera footage is stored, comes the understanding that our every gesture can be used against us at will, in any situation, now or in the future.

GESTUS is about pure looking, directing the viewer’s attention away from the narrative content and towards the rhythmic flow of moving images. The subject of the current iteration of GESTUS is the 5 1/2 hour film JUDEX made by French director Louis Feuillade in 1916, before the conventions of Hollywood storytelling were put in place. The film uses very few camera movements, and editing within a sequence is rare, allowing the dynamic geometries of bodies moving in space to be the main focus.

GESTUS aims to rediscover film history and to rethink the purpose of a film archive through the mediation of digital technology. The GESTUS project exists as an interactive application that enables users to explore a single film. The system recognizes similar movements in different video sequences and renders these movements side by side. The user is invited to explore the system by comparing the vectors of matching sequences, choosing to view only the sequences themselves, or jumping to different sequences whereby they are able to escape the film’s linearity. The second mode of presentation displays not one, but eight close matches. These are organized as a grid around the main clip that runs sequentially in the centre. The grid presentation encourages the viewer to engage in an active process of visual thinking, scanning the various images to decipher the similarities between them. The viewer’s cognitive effort thus becomes an integral element of the vector machine, allowing them to understand what the computer algorithm is doing.

The system invites, challenges and sometimes frustrates the viewer’s cognitive perceptual skills.

Joel Baumann

BLACKLIST searches the internet for hidden, deleted, forbidden and censored images and content. The findings are then put up for debate and made visible again as machine-made drawings and composite sketches. The regulation of digital data traffic is controversial because it has drastic effects. Nowadays workflows, financial transactions, consumption, social ties, individual modes of expression and even our love-lives are increasingly shaped by digital acts of communication.

Censorship, or filtering of data in one form or another, exists in many countries. Germany has a display ban regarding state security, anti-constitutional signs, pornography and violence. Unlawful content on German websites is deleted and the website operator punished. The German government even tries to stop the linking of forbidden content on websites outside of the country. The size and economic power of Germany is such that many of the take-down orders by German authorities are also carried out by US internet providers. In this way, Germany became one of the leading countries regarding the deletion of Google search results.

The classification of images has a social role. Secret lists, or so-called blacklists, however, are dealt with by immediate police intervention that forestalls individual intentions. Because of these secret measures of censorship, the criminal act of engaging with forbidden content coincides with processes of reflection upon the divide between legitimacy and illegitimacy of content. It does so because downloading and looking at the content is illegal, yet reflection would only be possible by viewing the content. These instruments of censorship silence any independent point of view and work directly against an individual’s acquisition of knowledge and the basic democratic order.

The project BLACKLIST searches for and traces forbidden images and content, using custom-tailored programs, databases and search engines that probe the web. BLACKLIST approaches this dangerous and fear-laden territory using automated processes where forbidden images are gradually visualized again and findings are reproduced by a machine as a sketch. A composite sketch appears, like a seismograph of visual regulation, illustrating what hides beyond the border of ostracism. The endeavor is akin to archeology or the inspection of an underground that might harbor a different and dangerous world of images.

By tracing these hidden images it becomes obvious that the blocked subject itself is only a representative for everything horrific. BLACKLIST establishes a new way of approaching the taboo, the ban on speaking and the shame regarding the outlawed. Contrary to secret censorship and the hidden apparatus of power, the probing of exclusive and inclusive tendencies shows a cultural base that has a common ground. They become a community project. The automated records allow for a review of what constitutes our political, cultural and image-related horizons of perception.

Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud

Art as a national identity is a reoccurring theme in the oeuvre of the Slovenian artist Jasmina Cibic. In FRAMING THE SPACE we find ourselves at the lake of Bled in Slovenia, the Villa Bled standing at its shore. Until 1980 it was the summer residency of the Yugoslavian head of state Josip Broz Tito. Originally the house was build 1883 as a royal country home. During the 1930s it was used as a summer residency for the Yugoslavian king and in 1947 it was remodeled into a representative building for Yugoslavian socialism by state architect Vinko Glanz and developed into an immensely prestigious building. A stage for official visitors from all over the world, the reconstruction was meant to shake off the political past and bourgeois life. Instead it was supposed to mirror the socialist visions and the reformation of the country: strong, modern and future-oriented.

At the original setting Cibic stages a film based on an archived dialog between Tito’s architect Glanz and the Western journalist Linda. While the architect elaborates on his architectonic ideals in combination with a veritable socialist design, the journalist points to the symbols of national representation and questions his sighted architectonic goals that have their origins in classic modernism. Thus, the abuse of art for nationalistic means becomes the theme of the work.

While classic modernism can be understood as a reaction to neo-styles and therefore as an architectonic attempt to overcome hierarchic societies, it is the formal elements that are devoted to this conquest. The theoretical pillars of this epoch are pure functionalism, rationalism, a plain outer appearance and formal language that was supposed to be grounded in the practicability of the object – the essence of this being Sullivan’s famous quote “form follows function”. Yet, even after its remodeling, the building presents itself as a monument and imposing representation of the nation. Cibic directs our attention not only to the local interior design made from wood and marble, wide paintings from the era of socialistic realism and sculptures of nation and state representing artists, but also shows us the framed depiction of a species of bugs, discovered in 1933, which was named Anophthalmus Hitleri. His discoverer who chose the name was obviously sympathetic to Hitler, not aware at that time what catastrophic consequences Slovenia would have to experience by the German and Italian occupation starting in 1941. While this episode is more about entomology and less about art, it is also another reference to the usurpation through ideological, political, national or social visions. The bug has become almost extinct nowadays, because it is a favorite devotional collectible among Neo-Nazis.

The reconstruction of a chandelier from the ballroom of the Villa Bled is part of the installation in the exhibition Monitoring. Low and heavy it looms over our heads while we follow the two conversing actors as they stroll through the house, and we feel a little crushed by the architecture surrounding us. The Villa Bled, on the other hand, today serves as a luxury hotel.

Andrea Linnenkohl

A robotic voice sounds from the receiver of a classical telephone. A letter is recited, written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his alter ego Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon in 1902.

A video installation composed of three screens shows early twentieth century recordings – short sequences of a coach journey, a river, and a landscape reminiscent of England. Hofmannsthal retreated to the British province to understand the language of nature and escape the confusion of his occupation with language and literature.

A few seconds later, the black and white image starts to flicker, colorful codes run across the screen. Just like when fast-forwarding a videocassette, and the needed data is not rendered in time, the clips show contortions, flickers and pixels in foreign colors.

In her work FEHLER FAKTOR, the young artist Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez generates glitches in the rendering processes of analog and digital data.

A Hex-Editor-Software allows her to view her collected data and to access their inner structure. Similar to biology, de la Fuente Gutiérrez understands the digital image as a system with a phenotype and genotype. She decoded the genotype of the three video clips of FEHLER FAKTOR and inserted the code into a text. This second text is also a letter with the title “An Lord Chandos, ein Fax aus der Zukunft (To Lord Chandos, a fax from the future)” written by Durs Grünbein in 2002. In this letter to Hofmannsthal’s alter ego he addresses the natural changes of language in the course of time.

The errors in FEHLER FAKTOR originate from a misinterpretation of data that are determined by the system and can be compared to a mistake that occurs in a translation of literature or a misinterpretation of a daily situation due to unfamiliar parameters.

The artist creates errors and glitches that provoke and challenge the viewer’s perception. The work addresses the difficulties and sheer endless possibilities of interpretation of the complex digital system.

In times of the Internet, an oversupply of digital images and videos, and the rapid access of information that appear at one click, the work FEHLER FAKTOR visualizes the (un-)limited possibilities of the digital playground, while at the same time questioning the way we use this very young but momentous medium. The work encourages us to reflect the role of the image in times of its digital reproduction and the change of language and communication.

Julian Schneider

At first we see a beam of light. Then a camera zooms out, revealing a film team that seems to film the camera driving backwards. All of this is happening in extreme slow motion so that the protagonists freeze. While we are looking at the film team, the crew itself is watching us, focused and immersed in their work. The slow motion intensifies the concentrated effort of the film crew, and in this way enables the viewer to participate in their reality in an almost physical way. In the same way the film itself turns into an object of contemplation by creating a reflection of reality through its lens. The camera slowly pulls back even further and we move away from the film crew whose slow movements and their significance now merely seem a vague idea until the whole image shatters into thousands of shards.

The explosion abolishes the limits of reflection. A new world beyond the surface is formed. The interaction between the falling objects with their many dancing and whirling reflections open up a new setting where reflection and event, fiction and reality can form new connections. New stories emerge in the minds of the visitor. By shattering the anticipated reality, the possibilities are multiplied into infinity and with every new shard a number of further possible impressions and stories come into existence.

The film industry constantly produces new images, claiming that they are representatives of reality. It is not always easy to estimate how real or reliable images really are, even if we accept the presented reality as such. In INSIGHT this fiction is literally shattered into pieces. Startled we follow the free fall of the shards. In their slow motion dance we realize the inherent questions that we normally would have ignored if the images had rattled through as usual. The shards turn into pieces of a flying puzzle whose original condition we cannot remember. The many small images, reflections, and realities that fly into our direction do not contribute to the forming of a complete picture. At the same time, we are amazed by the new images that we have not seen until now or that we chose to ignore. These reflections suddenly connect into a vast number of realities. Or are they merely replications of reality? The observer can and will never be sure about this. The puzzle remains shattered, and like the soldiers of the king he cannot piece Humpty Dumpty back together. Yet, at the end the viewer even refuses to do so. Like every traveler that has overcome his own limits and discovered new things, he is not interested in the original state anymore. The new has prevailed.

Thomas Fröhlich

The White Cube: sterile, bare floors, white walls – a clearly structured exhibition venue. The concept originated in 1920s architecture and aimed to offer maximum scope to the object, where the artwork could become the main focus. In a clear renunciation of the Salon of the 19th century, an interaction between the art object and architecture was to be avoided.

Brian O’Doherty coined the term White Cube in the 1960s and was its harshest critic. The White Cube replaced the art salon, but its well-defined architecture, square walls and specific function as an art venue gave it an authority that, to O’Doherty, overpowered even the art. 

Since its emergence, many artists have looked critically at the White Cube, aiming to challenge its structure through artistic interventions. The most famous example is Marcel Duchamp's “1,200 Bags of Coal” from 1938, where 1,200 bags of coal were hung from the ceiling, low and heavy above visitor’s heads. In 1969, Lawrence Weiner removed a square from the wall and thus created a painting for the exhibition “When Attitudes Become Form”. In 2009, Klara Lidén installed a room within a room that was formally inverted: the ceiling was covered in tar paper and glaring neon tubes were installed on the floor. While the interior walls were painted white, the exterior disclosed its scaffold construction in a complete inverse of the White Cube. 

The space-filling video-installation GRANITE by John Gillies uses the White Cube to transform natural phenomenon into art through the simple act of transferring it into the gallery context. Projection screens support this contextualization by referencing large-format photography and landscape painting. Gillies' video-installation shows a tremendous but dry thunderstorm in Granite-Country, in southwest Queensland, Australia. The single projections become visible through lightning flashes that flicker across the screen and lighten the room stroboscope-like. The viewer is not only surrounded by the violence of the storm but is literally captured by it. This feeling is reinforced by the sound: a mix of rushing, grumbling and animal sounds such as barking and the twittering and chirping of birds. However, the expected sound of thunder remains absent, intensifying the work’s tension through the continuous prospect of this specific bang. 

The combination of Gillies’ artistic use of content and form creates an uncomfortable forlornness in the space and an uncertainty and shakiness within the viewer. This clearly points to another phenomenon: indomitable nature. 

Andrea Linnenkohl

Visitors who enter the installation REMIS by artist Fabian Wendling, will find themselves in a room that impresses with its emptiness rather then with a quantitative presence of material. At first sight, its tidiness radiates clarity and harmony. But something's up.

Above the visitor's head run rubber-like belts that meet at a vanishing point at the far end of the room directly across from the entrance. There the belts join at a point fixed to a rectangular block that is somehow attached to the architecture. The belts, which span across the room like drawings, create the impression that they were installed to divide or even to modify the room. This first impression of REMIS will be revised soon enough under closer inspection.

In fact, the belts are not fixed to the architecture but are held in position by two magnets carefully counterbalanced by the artist. The rubber belts are stretched to breaking point and could detach at any minute, hurling the magnet with tremendous force and speed towards the observer. The room that appeared so harmonious at first possesses great force; a danger that Wendling deliberately evokes. While artists such as Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic address potential danger and its very real occurrence by using their own body, Wendling's take on the subject is more subtle and always involves stage-like references. The artist is no longer the subject affected by potential dangers; instead the viewer takes on this role by simply entering the space. The room becomes a passive part of the “weapon” – an escape is cut off, only a small radius of motion is possible, creating a strong feeling of exposure.

Wendling, who works both in the fields of applied and fine arts, only seemingly looks out of place within the context of an exhibition that shows New Media installations. The stage or set serves as a space for possibilities and makes the observer of the installation an involuntary protagonist in a possible play. Here, potential action addresses movement without using the means of the kinetics of film or digital media. The viewer’s initial passive reception to REMIS is subtly undermined the very next moment – in an environment latent with potential danger, passive reception is not possible.

The work is a physically accessible, never-ending thriller in minimalistic guise, poised between harmony and disharmony, tension and relaxation. This provoking intermediate state is underlined by the title of the work: REMIS is a chess term that can be translated as “a draw.” While there is the possibility of movement, an “unloading” of the belts, the situation is suspended in an alleged draw, so that one might speak of a pseudo-kinetic rather than a kinetic installation where the viewer can only hope that the installation will not go off in his or her presence. 

Stefan Bast