The exhibition unites outstanding artists from Stuttgart and its region. The focus lies on a contemporary tendency in the media art scene: reductionism in terms of form and content.
The artistic positions that meet here under the term reductionism cut down ornamental elements in favour of clarity. This clarity is hard to fathom, it relies entirely on a simplicity of visual elements, which could lead to the paradox impression of a clarity so difficult to understand that it reflects on the process of comprehension.
In order to produce this almost hermetic simplicity, the artists choose mixed media techniques. A work of art is often filtered through, or simultaneously produced in various media. This combination causes a destabilisation of meaning; and the point that what looks very simple is in fact a treatment of several media, and full of ambiguities, lies at the centre of the exhibition.
Jürgen Palmer works with analogue and digital means. In his art he covers an unusually broad spectrum, evoking a phenomenon that could be called “evacuating media”. It manifests itself as an evacuation of one medium into another – as if he didn´t trust the established forms; as if these were already dry and only transplanting them could bring them back to aesthetic life. This precedure allows him to make dicoveries beyond predefined genre.
The goal is to produce an aura, an intense imagery that depends on highly energetic images, authentic and unique. This also goes for his digital or partly analogue films, integrating reproductive processes to intense pictorial effect. Walter Benjamin linked the term "aura" to the analogue artwork that cannot be reproduced without loss. But in the specific frictions and contradictions of the “evacuating media”, there lie the auratic possibilities of the unique.
Screen objects (video loops) and the film trilogy “no danz”, “danz” and “no” by Jürgen Palmer will be shown to music by Joachim Spieth („Joachim Spieth Remix“, Kompakt, Cologne), DJ Rels („Diggin in Brownswood“, Stones Throw, Los Angeles, produced by Madlib & Peanut Butter Wolf) and Jürgen Palmer.
The VJ (video or visual jockey), photo and light artist Kurt Laurenz Theinert has his roots in concrete art. He concentrates on visual experiences that refer to art images and avoid fixed semantic codes. He experiments with formal and structural possibilities of lines, forms and planes in monochrome photo and light works.
Since 2001 Kurt Laurenz Theinert has been working on a live presentation of his artistic position, shaping time through light with software programme “ivis”, which Roland Blach custom-designed for him: graphic patterns are generated on a keyboard and foot pedals, and projected in real time. The video synthesizer generates pulsing images in shapes of rectangular planes, constantly changing their position, size and colour.
A light installation and photos by Theinert will be on view. At the opening, the artist will perform live on the video synthesizer in a collaboration with Roland Blach.
Marco Preitschopf is a pictorial artist now working on (sound) installations – without hiding the visual elements of sound production. On the contrary: his minimalist aesthetics exhibit the materials and technical equipment of a sound installation as part of its visual appeal. In his sound installations, Marco Preitschopf generates a blurring of the viewer's perception of the artwork and the self-created feelings generated in the viewing-process. Acoustic and visual stimuli blend with the physiological and psychological aspects of perception. Phenomena of psychoacoustics and resonance are used to build a complex sound sculpture, which needs the process of perception to come into being. The brain is directly stimulated and reacts immediately to the surrounding specific, manipulative air pressure, which is sound.
A sound and video beamer installation by Marco Preitschopf, “the imaginative dead_the still responding ear of a curiously killed cat” is on view.