Pattern & Presence

 I Was Raised on the Internet

Assemblage (new)

Assemblage (About)

One night, while walking on Kottbusser Tor, I noticed all of the windows of the Commerzbank had been kicked in.

The treacly safety glass, armed by its viscosity, hadn’t collapsed to the attack though, but rather developed into intricate monochrome kaleidoscopes.

In between the glass and a crooked Luxaflex, hardly attractive yellow advertisements hung from aluminium cables (far too strong for their load): Zufriedenheit garantiert & Die Bank an Ihrer Seite.

It was only the day after that I realised the potential of the setup. But when I came back the windows had been replaced, the blinds straightened and the ads unchanged. My new Canon also remained untouched in my Muji backpack and I felt even more useless carrying a tripod around.

Back in my studio I summarised the situation in a few Google Image Search keywords to serendipitously find ‘Mannequins in broken shop window’. This would become the texture for my new sculpture.

Since I recently migrated to Berlin, the Deutsche Bank had not approved my credit score for a credit card yet. I decided to use the lively watermarked stock photo instead, as I could not legally acquire the image from the image bank.

This digital image to my (supposed) disposal was 1300 pixels wide and 867 high, and depicted two pale mannequins in black tuxedos, standing in a shopping window behind a huge crack in the glass (also take note of a plastic lily in the bottom right corner). Still visible in the disrupted reflection some Toyota Prius Taxis. This all overlaid with the earlier mentioned watermark (Photoshop blending mode ‘lighten’).

The aspect ratio of the image was 2 to 1, so I decided to have it printed 2 by 1 meter (which is roughly 79 x 39 inch). For it to still look good when printed on this larger scale, I had to pump it up to remain sharp, in a similar way the detectives of Law & Order SVU get their CCTV images of rapists enhanced.

The software to do this couldn’t be purchased without a credit card either so my unregistered version of ‘PhotoZoom Pro 5’ also added its watermark.

I convinced the man at the print shop this really was the image I wanted UV-printed on PET-G.

While assembling the sculpture it seemed undoubtedly the best decision to leave the protective foil on.

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Installed as part of the exhibition <a href='https://ucca.org.cn/en/exhibition/art-post-internet/' target='_blank'>"Art Post-Internet"</a> at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijng. This sculpture was lost by the museum and never found back.

Assemblage (everything vs. anything)

Assemblage (chain)

Assemblage (canvas)

Assemblage (shell)

Assemblages dates to the time shortly after I graduated from art school. At that time my friends and I were often experiencing artworks through the images posted on sites like Contemporary Art Daily. The images we saw were of pristine spaces with perfectly realised works. I wondered how it would be if I rendered the exhibitions using 3-D software - programmes like Cinema 4-D were among the programmes I used for the works. Once I created these renders, I could post them and see if they would be featured on the blogs alongside the exhibition views on which they were based. 

The idea worked a little too well. A gallerist in London saw the images online and she liked them. Thinking they were IRL works, she asked if she could show them. It was a very generative dilemma. I could either admit they were digital works and had no physical dimension, or I could create the works IRL. I decided to accept the challenge, and it was challenging. The works are spheres, the easiest shapes to create digitally. It’s three clicks, assigning an image as a texture on a sphere and then making adjustments. To make the same shape in physical material is among the hardest things you can do.

For the surfaces, I printed some images from Google image searches - mostly textures from ready-made render kits. I chose mostly images that represented complex systems, network cables, intestines, whatever I could find that was interlocking and complex. The works became sculptures about the ways in which systems fit together, interpenetrate, and elude each other. The sphere is a kind of container, but also a fixed border, holding these complexities in tension and in place, not least the complexities behind their own creation. 