The mass-media-magnifying-glass this week focusses on Kobane. A small town in northern Syria that is only relevant to it because it is visible from a safe distance / border (with Turkey).
Hundreds of cities have been ravaged by fundamentalism in Syria and Iraq in these last months, no camera was present, newspapers & TV where slow to realize the tragedy that was going on. It was such a nice summer. But that’s how modern day mass media work. The need an iconic subject, a small world to exemplify and explain the big world to us…
Glitch art has been around for some time now, just think about Cage, Paik or even before that Dada in a sense. But with the advent of digital media, the glitch aesthetic has changed, absorbing new errors, failures and bugs. Now a distinct term in either electronic music, digital art, video art and even poetry, the glitch has arrived in main stream media for better or worse. There is a growing community sharing source materiel, techniques and know how, a new art form is emerging and it is vibrant.
Many cultural complexes have been altered permanently with the advent of digital technology but nothing parallels the rise of everyday pornography. Ubiquitous, it now is accessible to everyone at any time any place. The pornographic content that is shared has a tendency to radicalize, videos and pictures getting more and more hard core, the depicted practices often disturbing and bewildering. Finally the gender specifics seem to demand / imply a demeaning and degrading picture of “the female”, not speaking of their more or less consensual participation in these productions. This is what the series “her_face” is about.
The web 2.0 is so sexophobic it always makes me laugh so hard…
“digital_origine” glitch 3rd°, 1024x846px, 2014
based on “L’Origine du monde” by Gustave Coubet, oil on canvas, 46×55cm, 1866
I once founded a facebook group and used a miniature of Gustave Courbets’s “L’Origine du monde” as a picture for it. It took fb just a day or two before they censored the image. Now being part of the beautiful “Glitch Porn” group, there is a discussion going on, if we should post the source materiel which is NSFW by definition… This spawned my interest: could I do it again, this way and it would pass… well, we will see. Keep you updated.
But this picture has always been politically and socially explosive. Painted for a private cabinet, it was later acquired by the famous psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan who was it’s latest owner and kept it hidden behind a second painting. This cover-up painting was especially designed to represent the basic shapes and forms of the depicted ancestral womb but well disguised by a innocent landscape. It now can be found in Paris, in the Musée d’Orsay. I have never seen it myself…
Heaven… I’m in heaven, And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek, When we’re out together dancing cheek to cheek.
“my_dear_heaven” is a part of my post privacy glitch porn art series “her_face”. Her face deals with the depiction of the female face or its omission for that matter in modern day web pornography. In this instance, the source material was actually a transvestite / transsexual / transgender male in beautiful agony. While seeing it, it reminded me about that song “cheek to cheek” and it still does every time I see it.
“53D1468B” is a part of my post privacy glitch art series “her_face”. Her face deals with the depiction of the female face or its omission for that matter in modern day web pornography. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t condemn either the participants nor the producers of the original material. It is a wide spread cliché that all (at least) female actresses are bound to or forced into porn against their will and suffer pain and degradation without consent. Truth of the matter is I cannot judge what happened here because I don’t know the circumstances under which it was filmed. But that is missing the point anyway.
“before the fuck”, social glitch, 4000x3000px, 2012-2014
Sometimes, no need for glitching, society glitches all by itself. Some call this post privacy art…
“before the fuck” is an ongoing series of digital stills taken from porn sites and chat pages in that particular moment, when the user / actor leaves the room and us with that distinctive feeling of loneliness and bleak despair. It is a look inside the sadness and harshness of modern day sexuality when confronted with ‘the market’.
I did know I could not hold this up! But the main goal stays untouched: remastering and republishing my catalogue as you should being a digital artist. Codecs change, resolutions too and it is a good occasion the reassert the content and packaging of the stuff I have been producing for the last 15 years or so…
Mit dem Laden des Videos akzeptieren Sie die Datenschutzerklärung von YouTube. Mehr erfahren
At height of the Afghan war (post 9/11) this video tried to bridge the historic gap between the Vietnam war & Nixon’s administration and the current events with George W. Bush in power. I don’t need to elaborate on the (military) history of Afghanistan and all its potential conquistadores starting with Alexander the Great… Afghanistan has always been an “object of desire” last not least for its opium production. But foremost it is the last gate between the Occident and the Orient geographically, culturally and politically. Now, more than 10 years later, nothing has really changed to my eyes. Afghanistan was not democratized, on the contrary, other countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya and so on have been Afghanized. And like Vietnam, Afghanistan has 40 years or more of instability and chaos waiting for…
“Space – Nixon Remix” also deals with the almost erotic relationship between high tech (i.e. space exploration during Nixon admin / bio tech during Bush admin), war (Afghanistan / Vietnam), politics (the politics of fear both parties used) and paranoia (self explanatory). The film was almost entirely live mixed to the music for 2003 was also the high time of my VJing activities and it is a testimony to that early, mainly clip based period of VJing when that art form was in its infancy.
In Egyptian mythology the feminine takes many forms and disguises. One of the countless god-form and mythic figures that habit the Egyptian pantheon is Bastet. She is pretty close to what the Roman culture identifies as Venus and the Greek culture once called Aphrodite, a goddess of love and fertility. Yet it is not that simple. She is the nagging, youthful and (almost) virgin version of the woman, ‘ready for pregnancy’, in contrast to for example Sechmet, portrayed as a Lion which is more descriptive of a motherly yet fierce kind of a woman that already has given birth and now protects her own. You could say that, without uttering any personal preference, that she is the immature version of the female principle whilst other female goddesses like Sechmet (with whom she was later merged) or the fully accomplished (later) Isis represent more ‘grown up’ versions of that idea. There are many more interesting female characters in Egyptian mythology, take Maat (goddess of truth and justice) just to cite one example. But the here shown film focuses on the dichotomy between Bastet and Sechmet.
The film “Bastet” asks if there is such a thing a female (or gender) specifics, how these could be utilised and stereotyped and what our modern culture does with that. I once saw a movie, I guess it was a Tarantino one: an arms catalogue was shown where naked women presented automatic rifles. By the time I thought it was a perfect metaphor and a wonderful joke until I realized that this was actually real. Such catalogues indeed do exist… The video essay also hints at the close relationship between male dominated technology and the male sex (organ). This video is NSFW!
„Inv_nat“ explores the sensual relationship between 2 obvious antagonists pairings that are „nature vs. culture“ and “biology vs. technology”. In its aphoristic fashion, “inv_nat” establishes an erotic encounter between things we might find contradictory yet I believe these are not opposites but closely related and intertwined. When we speak of nature for example we think of the modern day garden that our planet has become. We have never lived in the wilderness or so it seems because the nature of the anthropocene is dominance over the wild i.e. barbaric through culture and technology resulting in culture. In other words culture is what we make of our biologic nature through usage of technology. The idea of untainted, untouched nature is a bucolic illusion, a dream of virginity, a fantasy that has found its in the fascist ideologies of the 20th century for they where rooted within those “back to nature” movements from the end of the 19th century. Take the “Volkskörper” (body of [a] people) metaphor used by the Nazis throughout their reign of terror and you’ll get what I mean.
“inv_nat” was produced for and displayed first during the exhibition “tiefergelegt” which took place in Berlin in 2002 and involved many artists that still form a collaboration network called Einheit_7 e.V..
“a_photon” is a short quasi-philosophical essay that deals with the limits of teleology with regard to coincidence or chance. As our lifespan is limited, we are driven by intention and purpose but, with ever shifting trajectories, can never afford to doubt our final goals. That life often evolves in a very different direction than we initially intended it to is a tautology. That we can and must be happy with what we have yet strive for more is being iterated again and again, it does not change the fact that it is no satisfying answer to the real philosophical problem that is ‘being’ itself. To my mind, it is the biggest mystery of them all.
“a_photon” was realized in early 2002, the text was read by Nick Russel (thanks again for that) and the music was composed and performed by Mr. & Mrs.T. It was realized using only win-/webdings with Flash.
