autopsi

Website of the project -> www.autopsi.de

Under the title autopsi, the Cologne-based artists Andreas Köpnick, Achim Mohné, Thomas Roppelt and Mario Ramiro are putting together a joint exhibition at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art.

Following their training, all four have developed complementary artistic positions that aesthetically examine and critically question the pseudo-harmony of man and machine.

autopsi is an artistic research project in the field of new media and communication technologies. The experience of the world has long since been decoupled from direct, sensory perception and has been shifted to the scanning of user interfaces. Comparable to the terminology of plastic surgery and medicine, this is an attempt at an autopsy of technical, electronic and virtual bodies.

The autopsists are both media virtuosos and electronic machine assassins; they use state-of-the-art technologies for their artistic work, but usually do not use them in the "spirit of the inventors". They dissect the technologies and reveal their actual functional forms and structures.

By operating apparatuses in a way "not intended for them", machines can transgress the limits of their construction. This can now be described as the "transcending effect of machines" or, more soberly, simply as a "malfunction".

The artists represent a generation that was still socialized in an "analogue" way, but has turned primarily to electronic and digital media in the course of its development. The media euphoria and modern communication fetishism are countered by a position that is as subversive as it is innovative. The much-vaunted disappearance of the sensual and physical in the electronic age is subtly called into question and the medial is reduced to its material conditionality.

A discourse emerges between poetry and technology, between functional and aesthetic experimentation in the form of a network of artistic works, reflections and visions.

Thomas Roppelt develops the computer-controlled slide installation Trade Now with slides of individual images of animated advertisements on the Internet.

Andreas Köpnick's electronically controlled installation Die Toteninsel (The Island of the Dead), based on the painting of the same name by Arnold Böcklin (1880), stages a complex media environment as an absurd illusory world.

Mario Ramiro's apparatus-free telecommunications project Debabelizer alludes to the cultural significance of towers as transmitters and receivers.

Achim Mohné presents a macroscopic, dissecting analysis of the laser beam with a site-specific laser installation.

Curated by Sabine Maria Schmidt