16.04-26.06.2011

Opening:15.04.2011, at 6.pm

 

 

Media art makes experimentations with technologies, explores their boundaries and possibilities and creates its own tools. Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss use the so-called Knowledge Discovery Tools – interfaces or a kind of data presentation methods used to construct knowledge. The artists intend to induce interference in perception and they assume an active participation of the viewers so their bodies are used as resistance. In Liquid Views, the viewers can see reflection of their faces on the screen, and once touched, the image blurs just like it would on water surface. The reflection of one’s face on water is something more than a poetic image of remembering and forgetting. It is, too, an experience, enabled by technology, of the body’s power to imagine and to create images. (Mark B. N. Hansen).

 

The image of an archive as a living database (netzspannung.org), combined with the use of mind mapping, becomes a cognitive tool and a kind of knowledge art. Image and text intertwined as one media flow provide the viewer with a suggestive image of both the whole archive and particular documents. The staging of daily news in the form of performative loud reading in urban space confronts the passers-by with pieces of opinions coming from ordinary people as well as mass media (Energie Passagen).

 

Performing Data is a review of Monika Fleischmann’s and Wolfgang Strauss’ artistic body of work: works from Virtual reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields), from Fluid Interface (Liquid Views) up to Floating Interface (Medienfluss). Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss show us an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.

 

Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss feel they are more than producers of art. Not only do they present their work at museums but they also show it at scientific conferences. As media artists, they use the research lab as a space for art, science and perception in order to explore the field of media aesthetics as well as to pursuit artistic work. The exhibition, which includes works from the early 1990s, presents artistic work of Media Arts Research Studies (MARS), initiated by the artists and continued until present day, to name just the projects realized for the Art+Com collective in Berlin (1987), in the research centre GMD Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik (1997), and in Fraunhofer-Institut in Sankt-Augustin (2001).

 

Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss

German artists and scientists, Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss, are considered pioneers of interactive media art. Since the very beginning of their artistic and scientific activity they have used computer both as a tool and medium. Their experimental research focuses on the interactivity in art and knowledge environment, as well as on the expanded and networked space used as interface. Learning new things from old things is one of the working methods applied to new media that they have invented for their use. Their ideas concerning visual presentation of information and computer-oriented models of navigation and dialogue have for twenty years now influenced the development of modern technoculture in the context of interactivity. The work of Monika Fleischmann & Wolfgang Strauss has earned them a Golden Nica of Prix Ars Electronica and numerous other honorary awards, and is constantly archived by ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe.

 

Monika Fleischmann's web page

Wolfgang Strauss web page