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Tag Archives: HfG Karlsruhe
Fresswagen
The “Fresswagen” was an project by three art students from the HfG Karlsruhe – an installation that was just as much a performance site as a food cart, and which showed up during many art events at the university or the ZKM. For the final installation of the Fresswagen, the artists produced a book that documented the previous stations of the cart, which was subsequently dismantled, and its fragments sold to the audience. They asked me for a text for the book, and I wrote a short imaginary history of the food cart’s medieval roots, and its impact on today’s contemporary art scene.
“Alles Roger in Kambodscha”
For the HfG Karlsruhe’s magazine Munitionsfabrik, I wrote an essay on how critical art becomes appropriated by the bourgeoisie as a feel-good strategy that relieves people from actually having to care and to transform society. This Munitionsfabrik issue was on “failure”, and while I think that art in general simply cannot fail if you see it as an experiment – even bad art makes sense, as an experiment’s unexpected outcome – its system can fail as soon as the experimental quality is abandoned, and art becomes an instrument for keeping the “creative classes” occupied (and quiet). You can get the Munitionsfabrik #21 through the HfG’s website (German). Worth buying for some of the other articles, too.
The Daniel Libeskind Research Studio
In 1999-2003, Daniel Libeskind held seminars at the HfG Karlsruhe. While the seminars were labeled as “Architecture”, they were actually on learning how to initiate and execute a project; on finding out what you want to do, and finding the best way how to do it. Also, these were very good seminars. Andreas Voigt, Libeskind’s assistant – and, later, guest professor at the HfG – plus several veterans from the seminars have published a book on the Libeskind years. It’s 300 pages in color, showing 40 projects by students, and brilliantly designed by Sahar Aharoni and Adrian Krell. There are a couple of pages on my own project Fear of Machines, and I was even allowed to write one of the forewords. You can buy the book in the ZKM Bookshop.
Fear of Machines
This is a project I made for a Daniel Libeskind seminar. Actually, I began working on it for the seminar in 2002, but didn’t finish it until 2004. It is a 1:15 scale model of rooms that relate to a story I wrote, that itself is built around a set of words from Giordano Brunos mnemotechnic vocabulary. The model is made from cardboard, Styrofoam and various bits, and painted with acrylics. The text and more photos can be found at unitropa.org.
Viscosys
“Viscosys” was a rather ambitious project I was involved in a the HfG. Our idea was to create a fake surveillance company, and to present it on a trade fair. We produced an image movie, a website, a dummy for surveillance software, and even a scent which would be spread around our stand on the fair. Unfortunately, the trade fair project did not materialize, and although the image movie was completed, we still have to make it somehow presentable for the web. There is a backup of the German website here; I built in a small script gag on the “Über uns” page, which, on a conceptual level, demonstrates how the entire project would have worked.
The project was concept was mainly written by Philipp Rosenbeck and me, while a lot of people including Frank Halbig and Samuel Röcker helped us with both ideas and the production. Ronald The designed the logo.
Behind the Bollenhut
A small teaser website for a film project by Bernd Schoch & Markus Behsler. The film – a documentary on the “Black Forest”, was never completed – Markus died in a car accident in 2006.
Ein Hut, ein Stock, zwei Regenschirme
Sub_Trakt catalogue
A catalogue I designed for Anne Niemetz’ diplom
a project. Anne and fellow student Holger Foerterer produced a installation for the HfG atrium, which tracked people’s movement and retraced it in a virtual landscape. Simultaneously, the tracking data was processed into a soundscape influenced by the people walking through the atrium, by their number and their speed.
Magnetstudie 01
For our school’s annual student exhibition 2001, Phillip Schulze and I built an old-school installation, or perhaps “closed circuit video sculpture”. Magnets attached inside an old TV set were controlled by a sound processor (programmed by Armin Purkrabek), which in turn analyzed the levels of input sound – in our case, a CD with Phillip’s own music. Visitors could take a seat in a comfy chair in front of the TV set, and see their own face distorted to the sound of the CD. (Photos by Phillip Schulze)
Phillip and Armin built a more advanced version with Magnetstudie 02.
The Man of Character
A short piece of home-recorded music and an animation, made in Flash. The title and the badly legible text come from a humorous chinese text, whose author I unfortunately cannot recall now. The objects and interiors come from my former one-room apartment in Karlsruhe. Obviously, I wasn’t a vegetarian yet in 2001.