Lisa Heissenberg
Remote-bangaloREsident@Blank Noise

Lisa Heissenberg was born in 1991 and studied Visual Arts at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts, finishing as Meisterschüler (Master Student). Since then she is a freelance artist.
 
In her work, she focuses on new media, nerd and geek culture, and language. The emphasis mostly lies on different concepts and strategies of storytelling, memorisation, connecting and commenting on the various set pieces that are evoked in relation to one another.
 
The Abusive Relationship Simulator (2015) appears to be a simple text adventure which can be accessed online as well as in a fixed terminal. Contrary to its genre-abiding design, the programme deviates from the norm in some very specific ways: The game can neither be won nor can the storyline be affected in the long term. There is no ending, no high score and all in all only 300 words which are displayed in a semi-randomised manner. Interacting with the programme always leads to a loop until the player decides to stop playing altogether. As long as he participates in the narration’s diegesis, he becomes an ‘enabler’ who continuously passes the ball to the computer, who impersonates an abusive partner. The programme is not written solely with textbook information, but is a patchwork of experiences of an assortment of different real people who lived through relationships like this.

In the two-channel video installation
Negentropie (Negentropy, 2015-16), different complexes collide in a variety of ways. Through drawings, videos and text overlays, an acute emergency, a past vice and the process of entropy, which will lead to the end of the universe, are described. The work aims at connecting the different narratives, working with all their similarities, contradictions and forecasts, to, with minimal means, refer back to the typical big questions: Is there any meaning in our actions if the universe is about to perish? Is a temporally finite universe more threatening than an infinite one? And how connected to ‘the big picture’ are we in our daily routines?
 
In Random Cravings (2016) the last but one play of British playwright Sarah Kane has been re-written in code and is randomly displayed through computer generated voices and movements of hand-drawn figures. The theoretically infinitely long piece, with digitally cold precision, connects the different monologues of each single actor to new dialogues.
 
Lastly, the short experimental documentary oo-nye-doo? (2016) deals with topics like commodity fetishism and privacy, accessed through a childhood dream: Owning a Furby. Critical questions arise: Why didn’t one get a Furby, and what did the NSA have to do with that? Why does Barbie have to know what I say? And how is the whole in us always exactly the same size of the product we desire?
 
In Germany, Heissenberg plans to support Blank Noise from afar and together with the organisers of the I Never Ask For It campaign, to build concepts for artistic approaches that will then be realised next year in Bangalore.