projekte
2020
Die kommenden Träume
installation & performance
They are right in front of us and at the same time they are somewhere else. In places that can only be perceived by them. We don't know what happens there. They look at us unapproachable as if they were looking through us. But perhaps this is just a new form of dreaming.
This performative media installation is based on painting-like Video portraits of sixty-three children and young people. In the videos, they are located in imaginary virtual worlds. The movements, glances and gestures we have developed together with them. developed for them. The result are choreographies for a future, in which the digital economies have already developed the next market and entertainment and communication technologies such as Mixed, Augumented and VirtualReality have become a natural part of our everyday life.
A "self-learning" code is choreographing the portraits of the children. Like an image recognition algorithm it seeks in the video material for similarities in costumes, faces and movements. Just as our bodies already are a part of a technical narrative through digital surveillance technologies and through the big data of social media.
At first sight, the arrangements of the videos appear to be random. But the code follows an agenda, which, when observed over a longer period of time, develops an immersive, poetic effect.
Candide
video art
The controversy between Voltaire and Leibniz about whether God is a good or a bad God and whether we really live in the best of all possible worlds has a very contemporary effect if you relate it to our current use of technology and to the upcoming possibilities of artificial intelligence. In Candide's video work for the musical staging of Candide, the fictitious artificial intelligence 'Q.E.D.' (quod erat demonstrandum) learns to understand the world, to interact with it and to shape and determine it itself. The human body and the human relationship between culture and nature are the main field of operation of the algorithm. Bodies become machines, human subjects become mere objects of nature. Man becomes a resource, almost as man himself has degraded plants and animals to resources.
The algorithm creates a world in which we need to find ourselves anew and determine this new self in order to meet and to be able to touch each other.
2019
Nichts. ®
mixed media installation
As a joint team of six artists, we spent a week developing and implementing a concept for an exhibition especially for the site of the joint residence in Gelsenkirchen. We examined both our own potential and that of the location. In our work we approached the concept of nothingness. What role does the absence of content or narration plays for a medium and for a particular space? The exhibition concept merged classical installation and video works with contemporary formats of virtual and augmented reality.
> link to the project
The Nature of Real Estate
mixed media
Who has the right to live and reside where and how? Is there a right for everyone to a place where one can exist? And can this place be chosen and shaped? What guarantees are there for this appropriated place of existence? You could answer these questions very differently for each species and yet almost all species are united by the fact that the place of their presence is threatened by humankind. Also the living space of humans themselves.
The social conflicts of recent years about real estate and expropriations in Berlin are the intellectual and conceptional gateway to this installation. Within the themes and materials connected in the installation, this subject is a bridge between the endangerment of human and non-human living spaces, an attempt to read an interspecies kinship in the disappearance of their places.
Art for Landscapes / The Forbidden Market
mixed media, art research & intervention
Art for Landscapes is an attempt to develop a methodology of performative interventions to draw cultural creation out of the institution and re-establish it in Landscape. Art for Landscapes reconsiders what is could be if a cultural event was created specifically with the terms and requirements of the landscapes in mind. Timescales are stretched, communication becomes molecular and it won’t always be comfortable/readable for the human gaze.
Art for Landscapes has undergone conceptual residencies in Mantova (I), Riga (LV), Leliūnai (LT), Wolverhampton (UK) between 07/2019 – 12/2019. These periods were focused on open ended experiments with form and subject matter. The outcomes included a video works 'Jam made from Contaminated Fruits (The Forbidden market)', 'Liturgy for a Landscape' and 'Timescales Stretch' (all working titles) but also further plans and concepts to develop art.
Kinder
documentary film
For Nina Wesemann's film about four Berlin children and their transition period between child and teenager, I once again made use of skills that were supposed to be lost, such as the use of a boom, a microphone and documentary settings. Listening to the children and the situations in which they were placed in so detailed during the filming was a real gift. How easy it is to miss voices and sounds when they seem to have no obvious functional dimension.
mem d'or
a/v - performance
Remembering and forgetting. Construction and deconstruction of consciousness. The noise of deleted VHS tapes and the algorithmic reconstruction of possible images and memory spaces from this noise served Fabian and me in this a/v-performance as a medium for an exploration of consciousness / memory and forgetting. From the noise, structures emerge that gradually become more tangible. Out of this arises strange and at the same time familiar worlds, in which remembering and forgetting together create the depth of a virtual sphere.
2018
UUID
video installation
UUID is a 128-bit number for the universal and unique identification of information. It allows independent parties to create joint collections and compilations of information without the risk of confusion.
For the event "dance for prance" during the festival Tanz im August, I developed a generative software that recorded the dance movements of the visitors on the dance floor via 3D camera and created a growing collection of physical UUIDs - dance movements and arrangements of bodies in space.
Your body, your clothes, your movement, this space, this time.
Distances ow around you. Smoothly.
Whats between 0.110^-10000 and 0.210^-10000 ?
Surfaces and lines become rough points. Rounded up.
Rough points form an alphabet to depict.
What is not mentioned does not exist.
UUID is an alphabet consisting of countless letters,
describes everything and is therefore (un)readable.
Let Them Eat Money
video art
The actual idea for the video installation for the play was a generative software that performs on stage at eye level with the actors. Just like the human actors, it should have the possibility to tell the story from its perspective, a non-human perspective. Even if this gradually did not fit into the staging, the code performs a data collection and its utilization. A fabric of data and information is the fluid architecture in which the characters operate.
2017
What Future?!
web & video installation
The research phase for the play 'Welche Zukunft?!' was determined by processes of collaborative development of future scenarios. On the website, the laboratory's workshops were presented on the basis of future scenarios. During the Laboratory Weekend at the Deutsches Theater, the participants and experts worked on an interactive scenario table created for the Laboratory. Is the future shapeable and if so, how can we learn from the mistakes of the past? How can we learn from sinister predictions of the future and take paths that avoid these dark times?
co-coders: Alex Hof & Lars Parmakerli
WUT
video installation
The little god in our hand: our smartphone. For the staging of Elfriede Jelinek's 'WUT', I developed a software with which the live images of a smartphone were recorded and then assembled generatively.
> link to the theatre play website at the Deutsches Theater Berlin2016
Dark Matters - Beyond Us
art research & video installation
Research into dark matter and dark energy, which according to scientific findings make up the majority of the universe, questions the current position of mankind in the world. Are there other positions from which the human being can be viewed and evaluated anew in an equal interaction of different matter? In a research on Dark Matter and Posthumanism, we met Rosi Braidotti and Hartmut Wittig to get closer to this question.
> link to the project at the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Berlin
My Lonesome Hologram
VR installation
For this interactive VR installation, the visitor walks through the installation in three stages: In the first room, visitors and a guide talk about personal aspects of presence and absence, the digital, loneliness and the social. Audio recordings of this conversation are made. In a second room, a gesture or movement of the visitor is recorded with two 3D cameras. In a third room, on a virtual island, one encounters one's hologram and the holograms of previous visitors.
> link to the project
Walls – Iphigenia in Exile
video & sound
For the Korean-German co-production, I developed videos that condensed the past of the German Democratic Republic and its current reflection in a double projection. For Jungung Yang's performance, I created artware with which the actors on stage could be recorded as silhouettes, only to slowly disappear into the digital fog.
> link to the theatre play website at the Deutsches Theater Berlin
Superbody
web & artware
In many video interviews we explored the attitudes, plans and thoughts of life science researchers. This material was presented in a specially programmed DNA video player on the web. It formed the content basis on which the participants in the participatory project SUPERBODY began to research themselves and search for the consequences of these sciences in their lives. For the 'research' of the participants I constructed a sensor apparatus with which various investigations could be made.
2015
Letter to Heiner M.
lecture / game
For the reading of the text by Goran Fercec I programmed a kind of computer game. The 'player' starts in a small hotel room: on the TV in the corner videos of the wars in the Balkans of the 90s are shown and mix with private recordings of a family from East Germany at the same time. The wallpaper, pictures on the wall and book covers in this room change in the course of the reading/play. Through a hole in the wall the player enters a courtyard. This courtyard turns out to be a cemetery for stone and metal in the form of useless statues.
TERROR
video & sound
For the play TERROR by Ferdinand von Schirach at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, I developed virtual landscapes and objects that take into account the virtuality of law, but also the technologization and absolute dehumanization of war. In an in-between world between dream, game and simulation, artefacts of the private and professional life of the main protagonist appear in the 3D environments.
> link to the theatre play website of the Deutsches Theater Berlin
Savoir Vivre I - IV
research / performance
For a few months, we assembled a group of artists and scientists to explore the changes in the cognitive apparatus caused by the technologization of everyday life. What changes is the human brain undergoing and how can we react to them by artistic means? In the depths of theory and patient conversations with each other, we found prototypes of discursive spaces, actions and procedures, which we tried out in small shows with visitors.
> link to the project2014
A Streetcar Named Desire
video installation
On two large screens, visitors to the play see a live film that is made simultaneously with the events on stage. Two cameramen provide the images for this and in the editing of the images glitches, digital errors, are created, which let the world of the undead break into the reality of the stage for short moments. The power of the images and their constructed hyper-realities strike at the reality of the stage as well as Blanche's reality.
In the Apparatus of Wars
video / artware / performance
The three-day simulation in the public space of Berlin focused on people with diverse war experiences and how to deal with them. By creating a mobile camera, monitor and image processing system, we thematized war realities conveyed by media and offered a playful approach to the technologically determined reality of war.
> link to the project websiteOutside the Box
research / artware
The director of the Kanuti Gildi SAAL in Tallinn asked us the question that we should follow up: "Where are the visitors of the theatres in the slightly older age?", since in Estonia mostly younger people are interested in art and theatre. We found young and older artists and let them compete against each other in an artistic competition.
2013
Tannhäuser
video installation
Always very close to the speed and temperature of Wagner's music, the images for the opera 'Tannhäuser' develop over several minutes, constantly juggling between Christian iconography and David LaChapelles-like Pop-Kitsch. The video installation's presence throughout almost the entire opera made it a dominant stage design agent and virtually expands the stage space into the mental states of the protagonists.
> link to the opera website of the Dortmund TheaterThe Golden Age
video installation
To dramatize the repetition in a three to four hour show, I created a video installation that could record, overlap and loop the stage from different perspectives.
> link to the theatre play website of the Dortmund TheaterThe Live Code: War and Peace in the Global Village
play / live coding installation
Five screens are hanging in the room, in the middle is a table with three people standing at screens. In this 'stage set' the live code negotiated the possibilities of programmable media and, in the presence of the audience, started the attempt to leave them to themselves.
> link to the theatre play website of the Dortmund Theater2012
A Few Messages To Space
video / film
The basis for this film is the text by Wolfram Lotz, whose implicit challenge to cross the boundaries of the stage in order to fail was both motivation and excessive demand for the shooting and postproduction. The working methods found in this way allowed theatre and film to merge in a very independent form.
Crash Test Nordstadt
performance / video installation
For the first joint work with matthaei & konsorten, I worked closely with the ChaosTreff Dortmund. The events at various locations in Dortmund Nordstadt where the project took place were broadcast in an online live video stream. The game about values and markets, which was at the core of CRASH TEST NORDSTADT, was integrated into this online TV in the style of stock market reports. In addition, I made documentary and staged video material with the residents of the quarter.
Master & Margarita
video installation
For the production I developed a double camera due to the limited space on stage, which enabled the cameraman David Wesemann to capture two perspectives at the same time and to use them in the live cut in the form of cut/counter cut. As a video player with the help of 3D programs, I created a virtual space between Bulgakov's literature and the Dortmund production.
2011
NAKED LENZ
video installation
NAKED LENZ was Martin Laberenz's second production at Schauspiel Dortmund and was created by overlaying Georg Büchner's 'Lenz' with William Burroughs' 'Naked Lunch'. I shot material on 8mm and developed animations in the style of Terry Gilliam's layering technique, which created a visual thinking space between both literatures. For me as a cameraman, the stage became a field of application in the midst of a theatrical overload.
Nora & Ghosts
video installation & live camera
In the joint staging of both of Ibsen's plays, a form of family genealogy was found. Live camera and video clips were the microscope and emotional gauge of Nora/Mrs Alving's private life.
2010
Visitor Q
video installation
In the middle of the theatre room there is a black box. With the help of several monitors, one can look inside. In the first third of the play, the camera was thus the extension of the eyes of the audience. This medial 'dressing up' of reality was the subject of discussion during the course of the evening, similar to Takashhi Miikes' film of the same name. For the video installation we shot material with the actors and two pornographic actors.
The Nijinski Project
video
In the ruins of the Old Leipzig Fair, movements, encounters with architecture and the camera trace the mental developments and ideas of Vaslav Nijinsky on the threshold of his schizophrenia. The film was made in several of these encounters, the respective duration of which was determined by the length of a MiniDV tape. I understood the camera as a timer and the camera work in a dancing way, as I've seen it for the first time through Maya Deren's work. I mounted the images and scenes created in this way using passages from the diary of Vaslav Nijinsky.
2009
Democracy in Motion
documentary film (co-director & cut)
The ten-week tour of Joseph Beuys' social sculpture OMNIBUS through twelve countries of Southeast Europe was edited in a continuous webcast during the journey and in a documentary film upon completion.
> link to the project website
Idiots
video
In the stage adaptation of Lars von Trier's IDIOTEN I learned a lot about how to handle the camera on stage. The autonomy with which the actors entered the stage and in front of the camera challenges me as a cameraman to explore my own autonomy as a cameraman and to put it into practice.
2008
Winter Machines
video
Based on Dietmar Dath's pamphlet, the actors ask what can be done to free the machines so that they can take revenge on the humans. Equipped with a small live camera and a few monitors and DVD players, I created my first video installation in a theatre.
2007
Lazar
documentary film
The documentary film about Holocaust survivor Israel Laszlo Lazar. The film shows the places of his childhood, as well as the places of deportation and imprisonment. His daughter accompanies him on his journey.
> Link to the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum