A slow pan along a forest that breaks off at a small terrace in the foreground of the picture: Slender conifers stretch upwards over cut and fallen trunks, dead branches and roots, churned soil and dry grass, and parade past one another, structuring the space to impenetrable depths. The apparent naturalism does not hold up for long. Something is not quite right with this picture, this movement. In the background the trunks begin to stretch out horizontally. Has the image been digitally altered? Have artificial effects been applied to the idyllic scene? Not at all. Instead, the image as a whole turns out to be artificial, its realism the result of elaborate reconstruction. TRIFTER 1 strains at the synapses. Training for the digital. (Thomas Korschil)
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The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy. The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside. Such is the happiness which made this rabbit. i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me. After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You […]
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Street With A View introduces fiction, both subtle and spectacular, into the doppelganger world of Google Street View. On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more… Agrandir le plan Project website
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“The Bureau of Found Appropriations / Département des Sourires” is a work which is part of a long-term study on strategies of appropriation and forms of production (and reproduction) in Asia. My main attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretation and errors committed in the process of translating and copying cultural commodities. How can an image be read, used, interpreted, unterstood without knowing its cultural context? In 2008 I stayed with Matthias Meinharter for three months in southern China working on the art/film project Chinese Whispers in Dafen – the copy capital of art. There, approximately up to 10,000 painters live, work and are specialized in copying work in specific styles by a wide range of masters of historical and contemporary oil-painting. Annually, more than five million paintings are produced at assembly lines, usually copies of masterpieces. The reason why this use of imitations strikes western societies as a serious cultural difference has to do with a strong historical correlation between painting and calligraphy: in China a good copy is often considered as a reward and honour to the technical and compositional skills of the initial inventor and master. Memorization is taught as the manually repeated imitation of an original; hence […]
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Google Portrait Series Four Google self-portraits commissioned by Microwave Festival, Hong Kong, 2009. Each code represents a visual enryption of a search on ‘Aram Bartholl’ in a specific language on Google. A Google Portrait is a drawing which contains the Google URL search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Any camera smart phone is capable to decode the matrix-code with the help of barcode reader like software. The result points the mobile phone browser to a search on the portrayed person’s name at Google. A large number of people can be found by name on Google today. Everyone who is working on a computer and uses the internet regularly can be found on Google. Even people who don’t use computers can be found sometimes because their names appear in ‘old’ media (i.e. books) on the net. ‘Egosurfing’ is a popular way for a user to find out what websites and information Google returns on his/her name search. How many hits does Google show on my name? Am I popular? Do I want to be found at all? Who writes about me? What do people find out about me when they google my name? Am I in concurrence to […]
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2009 Reconstruction of a leaked cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution using found comments on the video posted on web forums on the first day of the video’s appearance 8 mins 34 seconds Single channel video projected on black painted surface Black and white, no sound Installation view (see documentation video) This is where we’ll do it #5, 2008 YouTube video that was downloaded, partially erased and uploaded to YouTube again 18 sec loop, black and white, no sound From This is where we’ll do it, series of YouTube videos from which the performing people were erased XXXXXXXXX in the Expanded Field, 2008 Downloaded copy of Rosalind Krauss’ essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ from which all references to art were removed using standard methods of redaction Redistributed pdf, unlimited laser prints
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Fünf Monde (Five Moons) Four lightboxes with drawings of a moon mounted on tower cranes at a construction site Installed in Vienna (AT) 2007/08 South Tyrol (IT) 2008/09 Tower cranes, lightboxes, scratch drawings Dimensions variable (lightboxes: 200 x 200 x 25 cm)
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