The LUMO LED light-image machine plays a constantly changing sequence of light patterns and shapes on its 16 light chambers. Chaotic formations alternate with geometric and rhythmical ones, lightning effects interfere with softly dimmed transitions. In LUMO LED, the Hauert Reichmuth studio is continuing its development of pixel light machines, making playful reference to the image generators used in the computer art of the 1960s. LUMO LED was designed in collaboration with Volker Böhm..

Sibylle Hauert and Daniel Reichmuth have been working on a joint artistic concept that includes media productions, installations, objects and performances since 1999. They develop and build electronic systems in combination with design software. One of the focal points of their research lies in human-machine interaction and how to stage it spatially. Sibylle Hauert and Daniel Reichmuth live and work in Basel.

video doc
atelier hauert reichmuth

  

The "loading" video shows the entrance of an underground car park. This space is built in a schematized way, close to the cardboard model. Identical vans continuously enter the building. Only the signposting elements distinguish themselves from the surroundings by their colours.
The action creates a tension linked to the expectation of "an event", while its repetitive side tends to make the scene absurd and disconnect it from its disturbing referent.
Therefore, while reducing elements to a minimum, we provoke a feeling of frustration between what happens and what could occur. (Text collectif_fact)

The group of artists, collectif_fact comprises Annelore Schneider and Claude Piguet (and Swann Thommen up to 2009). Collectif_fact live and work in Geneva.


Loading
collectif_fact

           

The “5 Danmatsu Mouse Objects” reveal relics and traces of the destructive activities described above in a flat display case: a smashed computer mouse and gleaming silver pins that trace the tracks of the cursor at the moment of its agony against a black background.

The Japanese group of artists Exonemo has been causing a stir in international media art since the end of the 1990s. They have established themselves as important innovators with humorous projects that always reveal reflective depth and aesthetic complexity. They have exhibited their works at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Mori Art Center in Tokyo, while in 2006 they won the Golden Nica of the Ars Electronica.


Demo version of DanmatsuMouse
exonemo

    

Between 1999 and 2004 Jodi deconstructed a range of commercial ego-shooter games. The result was the work complexes “untitled games” (1999-2001), “Wolfenstein Version” (2001), “Jet Set Willy Variations” (2002) and “Max Payne Cheats Only” (2004).
In “Max Payne Cheats Only”, Jodi takes over the tough third-person shooter Max Payne and uses the tricks built into the game to create for players, who are not aware of what is going on, a continuous cycle that runs through the 3D world of the game and seems absurd. The physical and spatial limits are lifted, the figures in the game race through space like crazed androids. In leaving the realistic 3D graphics of the game in place for its Sisyphean effects, Jodi deconstructs both the heroic pathos and the 3D spatial illusion. To quote Jodi: “We wanted to do something that was non-aesthetically ours. No scary black blobs on jumping white backgrounds, but trying to achieve the impossible - an abstraction within the aesthetic of a game which is already set."
Unlike “untitled games”, “Max Payne Cheats Only” does not offer the viewer any interactive navigation through the world of images, but presents the work as 2-channel video on DVD. It is shown in a 5-copy version on 2 monitors or is presented as a double projection. In addition to the high-resolution version of the work, Jodi offers a website with network videos of “Max Payne Cheats Only” that can be accessed free of charge.

The artists’ collective Jodi consists of Joan Heemskerk (*1968 in Kaatsheuvel, The Netherlands) and Dirk Paesmans (*1965 in Brussels, Belgium). They live and work in Dordrecht in the Netherlands.
The work “Max Payne Cheats Only” was shown at the following exhibition sitest: Künstlerhaus Wien (2010), eARTS BEYOND, Shanghai Contemporary art fair (2009), ArtHouse Austin (2008), Dallas Video Festival (2008), iMAL, Brussel (2008), HTTP Gallery, London (2007), Carlow Arts Festival, Ireland (2007), 11th Rencontres internationales Paris/Berlin, Paris-Villette Theater, Paris (2006), transmediale Berlin (2006), MonteVideo, Amsterdam (2005), Pace Wildenstein, New York (2005), Spacex, Exeter (2004), FACT, Liverpool (2004)

website maxpaynecheatsonly
jodi

      

The animation “A Young Person's Guide to Walking Outside the City” was produced in 1983 in the programming language TI Extended Basic on a TI-99/4A home computer from Texas Instruments, using code written or discovered by the programmers themselves. The game is captured using the graphic image aesthetics and linear movements of the contemporary Atari and arcade games, which recall Pac Man (Namco Jp 1980), for example. The DA Collection purchased a copy of the work with exhibition rights in January 2007 on the occasion of Alexander Hahn’s retrospective in the Solothurn Museum of Art.

Alexander Hahn (*1954) lives and works in New York and Zürich. His work explores the shifting realities of everyday life, memory and dream. The method : overtly and covertly recording what's ephemeral and seemingly mundane, then mulling over the various ways these snippets might possibly relate, much like trying to fit the pieces of an unknown puzzle.


video
Alexander Hahn

    

Signals, noise, frequencies, snatches of sound, distant voices. The movie signal is hardly to be recognized. Blured edges, smeared images. Everything melts. Melts away. The absence of concrete images and the electrospheric soundtrack from overlapping radio frequences, causes a abstract hypnotic void, a space without beginning or end, without clear structures. . . «Frequency»was designed 2008 as a contribution to the online project «beam me up».

Esther Hunziker’s art includes Internet-based works, videos, interactive animations and series of images. Her conceptually-based output unites virtual realities and illusions from the real world. For “nord” she won first prize in 2004 in the “Literatur.digital 2003" competition organized by the dtv publishing house and t-online. Esther Hunziker lives and works in Basel.


Frequency online
Esther Hunziker

      

She who "sphinxes" answers questions, or rather: answers to them. Thus is the resolute declaration of the Sphinx of Pontresina concerning her own actions. But whose actions are explained? Those of the machine, which answers – in the baroque poetic form of the sestina at that – or the actions of the author Birgit Kempker, the original creator of the project? The Sphinx of Pontresina can be reached via the net: every visitor is encouraged to enter questions, anonymously or revealing their identity, and may expect a direct answer. Kempker distorted and multiplied her own voice using the co-authorship of several machines, the sestina-producing alter-ego as well as several digital voices – thus programming a mixture of direct communication and literary freedom. Seit Herbst 2004 beantwortete die Sphinx über 800 Fragen.

Birgit Kempker: prose, essays, radio plays, art texts, exhibitions, lectures. Professor of Language and Image at the Basel School of Design and since 1990, responsible for setting up and supervising the Language/Literature Department at the F+F School of Art, Zurich.

Sphinx
Birgit Kempker

    

TV Bot by Marc Lee (2004) automatically searches the most recent news items from the Internet and compiles these radio, television, newspaper, and website news - which never are older than one hour – to the world’s possibly most up to date TV program. Since it’s only the novelty criterion that counts – and not in which language the item has been written, which religion or which topic it covers, for instance – TV Bot indiscriminately compiles relevant and irrelevant pictures and news (the most up to date search inquiries on fireball.de, for example) as well as news reports from the most varied continents and cultures, and puts together, from these, a television program almost made from one casting. (Inke Arns)

“TV Bot 1.0” was designed in 2004 as a contribution to the online project “56kTV bastard channel”.

Marc Lee works as a media artist, graphic designer and software developer. Since 1999, his network-oriented, interactive projects have been pursuing an approach to production that has an artistic orientation. Lee experiments with information and communication technologies and locates clusters of themes that are important for communication processes in digital networks. News items prepared by journalists play a central role in this work, which can also be understood as a critical analysis of the susceptibility of the media to manipulation.

Video-Documentation TV-BOT 1.0 (Nov 23 2005)
Text concerning TV-BOT 1.0byn Inke Arns, Dortmund 2004
Marc Lee

    

On 27 January 1997 at 09:42:30 the graphics program consisting of 32 x 32 white panels began. At the top left, the Java applet started a countdown, as black panels started to join together, moving to the right from field to field at a pace that halved with every panel. The exponentially declining speed with which the black panels move to the right and downwards communicates a perception of time that is not that of human beings. In the artist’s estimation, it will take 16 months to play out all of the 4.3 million combinations of white and black panels on the top line. To complete the second line, it will take about 6 billion years. The title of the work, “every Icon”, plays on the fact that over the period that it will take for all the panels to turn black, to which it is almost impossible to attach a figure, all of the image combinations, both identifiable and meaningless, will appear that it is possible to construct on a fremework of 1024 panels.
In the early years, Simons offered personalized versions of his work through Amazon, of which 2 are in the possession of the DA Collection.

John F. Simon's work covers a wide variety of forms of computer-based images and objects. The artist lives and works in New York.

Every Icon
John F. Simon, Jr.

      

The »Travelogue« game was developed by Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg in 2004/2005 as a contribution to the online project 56kTV bastard channel. Travelogue falls into the game art category. In the virtually accessible image space of a hotel room, the player/viewer of the work has to complete various tasks requiring significant combinative efforts and differing approaches until he or she finds the exit from the image prison (hotel room). This artistic game develops an image story, the progress of which must be interactively discovered through playing the game.

With works such as “Legende” (1994), “Wie man eine Seele baut” (1997) and “Vue des Alpes” (2001), Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg were among the first Swiss artists to address both the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of digital works of art in a highly reflective way.


play the game
essay on the game by Claus Pias
Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg

The image of a thread stuck to the wall with tape is projected on to another wall. A microphone stands in front of it. The tones and sounds picked up by the microphone move the thread, making it vibrate gently, twitch or even curl up completely, depending on the intensity.

Jan Voellmy (*1978) is a freelance graphic designer and artist living in Basel.

Schnur Movie
Jan Voellmy