Linz Art University and Ars Electronica continue their successful collaboration:
TIME OUT .02
(Linz, June 5, 2014) TIME OUT .02 is the next installment in the exhibition series that Linz Art University and the Ars Electronica Center launched this past January. The featured works are AN EYE NAMED FRANK by Julian Reil, ART RETRIEVER by Rosi Grillmair and TIME TO X by David Hochgatterer. “This time, we’ve intentionally selected three highly diverse locations in the Center to accentuate a particular thematic link between the respective work and our ongoing exhibits,” noted Ars Electronica Artistic Director Gerfried Stocker. “And it’s precisely this spatial and substantive integration that brings out the quality of the works,” said Prof. Gerhard Funk, director of the university’s Time-based and Interactive Media bachelor’s degree program. “It’s fascinating to encounter projects by our students on display amongst works by prominent artists and scientists from all over the world, and to see the approaches they take to dealing with a particular theme or issue.” TIME OUT .02 opens on Thursday, June 5, 2014 at 7 PM.
AN EYE NAMED FRANK / Julian Reil
A little black box with an open lid and, nestled inside it, an artificial eyeball complete with a pupil that happens to be named FRANK are the essential—or, actually, the visible—components of Julian Reil’s interactive work. What installation visitors can’t see are its inner workings including a camera tracking system that lets FRANK know which people are in front of him at the moment and where they’re going. Actually, FRANK is very well-informed indeed about who’s moving about in his field of vision, and he doesn’t let them out of his sight for an instant. In AN EYE NAMED FRANK, Julian Reil has come up with a lighthearted approach to creating an obviously artificial object and endowing it with something akin to a personality. And to giving (human) observers beholding his work the feeling that they’re under observation too.
TIME TO X / David Hochgatterer
In TIME TO X, David Hochgatterer alludes to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Space and Time and its four-dimensional hyperspace. David Hochgatterer’s audio installation consists of 96 tiny loudspeakers arrayed one next to the other in an almost five-meter-long housing mounted on the exhibition space’s wall. So much for the installation’s hardware. David Hochgatterer has divided up an audio file containing a spoken sentence into 96 fragments and plays each one of them back—simultaneously—on one of the 96 loudspeakers. The result is what you might call a “freeze-frame of a timeframe,” since this sentence’s entire acoustic information is compacted into a single moment. From afar, the installation visitor hears a noisy “overall impression.” But when you go at the right speed from left to right along the loudspeaker array, you simultaneously move forward in time—one fragment at a time—and you can hear the human voice. But if you remain stationary in front of a particular loudspeaker, what you effectuate is tantamount to making time stand still.
ART RETRIEVER / Rosi Grillmair
What determines the value of a work of art? Rosi Grillmair’s ART RETRIEVER deals with the fluctuating interrelationship between the material and conceptual value of artworks. The point of departure of her considerations is the fact that the art objects that command the highest prices are usually private property and are thus “withheld” from the public—except for the headlines made every time they’re bought and sold. In any case, museums and other public institutions have been dealt lousy hands in the high-stakes poker game in which the pot consists of art objects that the whole world wants not only to see but to possess as well. Rosi Grillmair’s response is ART RETRIEVER, a way to make these very works visible and accessible again. A jumbo screen displays images of the world’s most famous and most costly art objects together with information about where they’ve been exhibited and who’s owned them. The more information is available on the internet, the more distinctly the respective image can be seen. The data materialize gradually on the screen—first, individual sales data about the respective work appear; then the information becomes denser and overlaid, so that the respective work is displayed with increasing clarity. Ultimately, the best-known and highest-priced works (by such artists as Picasso, Warhol and Richter) are visible in ultra-high definition; flashes in the pan or so-called mid-list artists, on the other hand, remain identifiable only in the form of their sales figures.
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