Visual Arts

Media art can no longer be derided as art out of wall socket. Is the concept obsolete? Art created with and in new media is today nearly bewilderingly diverse. But it almost invariably relies on interaction. A look into the studios into a few contemporary German media artists.



“I’m a beauty – I’m a virtual“, says a computer-generated, recognisably womanly form. In technically complex, sometimes oversized, sometimes life-size interactive image projections, one can make contact with the “virtual”. Acoustically or by touch screen, however, she cannot be animated to produce more than stereotypical gestures and facial expressions. The perfect styling and symmetry of the beautiful bald female is at once fascinating and disconcerting.

“I’m a beauty – I’m a virtual” – Kirsten Geisler

Dream of Beauty is the title of a series of installations by the artist Kirsten Geisler, who was born in 1949 in Berlin but today lives in Holland, a series in which she presents wishful thinking, clichés and abysses of man’s creative drive. In Version 3.0, a female clone moves in high-heels along a catwalk. Long legs, a rail-thin, immaculate figure, graceful movements. Is this the ideal beauty?

Making hidden interfaces visible – Knowbotic Research

“What interests us isn’t so much the border, but rather the overlapping of electronic and non-electronic fields that call for new possibilities of action and work”, says the artists group Knowbotic Research, outlining their concept. Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Hübler and Alexander Tuchacek founded the group in 1991 in Cologne and now teach in Zurich. The trio began with complex virtual installations.

In Dialogue with the Knowbotic South Wilhelm, Hübler and Tuchacek demonstrated and exposed the problems of the contemporary production of knowledge. In an exhibition room they visualised in multi-media form research about the Antarctic retrieved from international databases – on large screens, with a sound interface and with a refrigerator that simulated air currents and turbulences. In the series of projects entitled IO_DENCIES, questioning urbanity (1997–1999) they examined complicated interfaces between digital networks and urban spaces in cities such as Tokyo and São Paulo.

A series of their interventions in which they have recently acted directly in urban space is called Testfälle (i.e., Test Cases). With the call “Become MacGhillie!”, Knowbotic Research 2010 summoned the Ruhr area. People could hire a fully body costume and go about in it incognito, but not unnoticed: “Without goal, without intention, without purpose ... Not man, not woman, not old, not young, neither threatening nor cute”.

Structure and chaos – Julius Popp

“I’m pleased every time I see a word fall”, says Julius Popp, who was born in1973 in Nuremberg but today lives in Leipzig, referring to his bit.fall: a large-scale, space-encompassing installed waterfall that rains words with the rapidity of passing seconds – a memorable metaphor for speed, transience, brevity and the rotation of information and proclamations.

Since 2002, Popp has built several versions of the waterfall. In the bit.flow series, coloured liquid circulating though a tangle of transparent tubes serves as the information carrier. The robot sculptures micro.adam and micro.eva are experimental set-ups that are supposed to make it possible for machines to learn.

Complex technology or intuition – Christina Kubisch

Deliberately reduced and intuitive, the Bremen composer Christina Kubisch uses technically available resources. As early as the late 1970s Kubisch, who is regarded as a pioneer in sound installations, already synthesised acoustical and visual elements in outdoor spaces into unfamiliar spatial experiences.

She invented a hearing system that works on the basis of induction – a portable listening shell, which was later replaced by special headphones. Only when the wearer moves can he hear the sounds that circulate through cables which the artist has laid throughout the room and so perceive places in surprising ways.

Aim and dilemma

Art with and in new media can re-invented ever more swiftly – but also be ever more rapidly forgotten. Often it is by no means intended for eternity. Since the discovery of photography in 1839, the development of new media technology has been more and more accelerated – for commercial and political reasons, but also often initially on military grounds, as history and the present show. Artists have adopted the progress of film, radio, television, computers, the Internet and telecommunications media with increasing rapidity – sometimes euphorically and with the aim of being avant-garde, sometimes simply so as to be part of it. But also so as to reflect, question or undermine social and societal change. And naturally so as to achieve new aesthetics. Often media art has first had to struggle for recognition. Not infrequently the outdated has been vehemently discredited. But utopias and manifestos, such as those of the twentieth century, are no longer.

The term “media art” has also now turned out to be unsuitable. “Media art, in my view, is precisely the attempt to escape a definition – an art that can’t be pigeonholed (as painting, sculpture, photography, graphics and so on)”, says the media art theorist Dieter Daniels of the Leipzig Academy of the Visual Arts. Video art/ video installations, interactive installations, immersive environments, performative events of computer art, and communication and Net art describe the diverse artistic approaches to new media.