reality checkpoint – körperszenarien

reality checkpoint – body scenarios not only provides an outlook on the future exhibition concept of the new House of Media Art in Oldenburg, but also aims in a multiple sense to define a place and mark a turning point within the cultural upheaval.

How does media art translate what ‘body’ is today? The image of the body has become virtual and to what extent does this change the body itself? When genetic engineering models new body characteristics through information modification, the concept of the human being is in danger of becoming the concept of a living information structure.

Art designs and invents different ways of dealing with this scandal. It understands the body as a projection surface and field of experimentation for various fantasies, ideas and concepts. Body - this can be the media-smoothed surface, the perfect shell as well as the media-deformed, transformed or dissected corpus. The technological and aesthetic structures of old and new media give rise to diverse concepts of the body that allow traditional perceptions to be dissolved and new perspectives on the human being, including social perspectives, to be opened.

reality checkpoint – body scenarios is a group exhibition that discusses various facets of current artistic statements on dealing with a changing concept of the body. This is carried out by means of a variety of media and techniques, for example sound, performance, video, photography, animation and net art.

Anna Anders' video installations treat the screen as a partition, as an interface between the physically real and the virtual world. ‘Touchscreen’, a video/computer installation that was awarded the First Marl Video Installation Prize, is an interactive piece that enables visitors to make contact with the reality existing behind it by touching the screen and thus provoking reactions from the virtual inhabitants. Co-author: Klaus Gasteier.

Inspired by the obvious everyday and situational, which he captures as digital notes, the New York artist Michael Ballou develops video productions that combine new and old recording techniques to aesthetic effect. In the exhibition, short films by the Philip Morris Art Grant recipient are shown and a public action deals with Oldenburg's personal monuments and their ‘public bodies’.

In Angst vor Gesichtsröte (Afraid of Blushing), a provocative, distance-free text written in large format on the walls of the exhibition with a red woollen thread and wrapped nails, Birgit Brenner addresses the body as a place of constant transformation. The states of consciousness and fears that accompany this are both the theme and motif of this work by the master student of Rebecca Horn.

The Brandon project not only explores gender transitions as a cultural phenomenon but also as a technological one. The title comes from Brandon/Teena Brandon from Nebraska, USA, a transsexual who was raped and murdered in 1993 after his female anatomy was discovered. Brandon was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum's Virtual Museum and Permanent Collection and designed by Shu Lea Cheang, and will receive the open interface ‘bigdoll’ in Oldenburg. Using the computer mouse, ‘bigdoll’ randomly receives 50 constantly changing images that explore the iconography of gender and identity. When the centre of 15 images is clicked, a reconnecting ‘bigdoll’ is revealed. The interface in the exhibition is open to be accessed from the web. Users are invited to send 50 images via the internet to alter the website and projection in the exhibition.

Innen-Aussen-Mongolei (Inner-Outer Mongolia) by Stephan Froleyks, Sainkho Namtschylak and Sebastian Winkels is an intermedial composition for the stage. The work revolves around the thematic centre of space: distance/proximity. Reise in die Mongolei (Journey to Mongolia) is the methodical connection between two distant places and two contrasting cultures. The common ground is embodied in the musical practice. The artists met colleagues of the same guild in one of the most remote parts of the world. The experiences, images and music are transported back home by means of such diverse media as film, self-made musical objects and, last but not least, by the musicians themselves as carriers of knowledge. In the Edith-Russ-Haus, the collected material is processed in a live performance.

Kirsten Geisler creates virtual portraits of people, shockingly realistic in their proximity and size, fascinating in their flawless beauty and oppressive artificiality. The mirror she holds up to the viewer raises the question of one's own constructedness, of identity and ‘nature’ of the human being. Stereotypical beauty stands as a metaphor for the old notion of the ideal, perfected body. The fact that the computer-generated portraits can also be addressed, that they enter into an interaction with their counterpart in a reduced way, only increases the horror and the pleasure of irritation. The wink of ‘virtual beauty’ promises much, but answers nothing.

Eduard Gorokhovski belongs to the group of non-conformist artists around Ilya Kabakov who were at the forefront of the cultural debate between doctrine and world art development in post-Stalinist Russia and in the end were expelled from the country. His current art is a photographic exploration of form, body and surface. The selected series shows confrontations with the body and formal material of the Bauhaus, which is especially dominated by geometry.

Limboland is the symbolic setting of Bjørn Melhus' internationally awarded videos. A no-man's land in which the artist stages fairytale-like narratives of beings that are electronically doubled, exposed to processes of alienation and shifts in identity. The artist, himself the protagonist of his productions, draws on the rich visual and auditory resources of film and television culture to explore the frightening space between original and copy, physical and virtual reality and the ‘disturbing consequences of the technological reproducibility of man’.

Werner Nekes, probably the most important German experimental filmmaker, presents his latest film The Day of the Painter from 1997 for discussion. In it, he addresses the male view of the female nude in its cultural-historical development from different visual and filmic-aesthetic perspectives (ranging from Dürer's measuring device to the experimental camera). Werner Nekes will be present at the screening. Nekes, who among other things taught for several years as a professor at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts, will be “artist in residence” at the Edith-Russ-Haus and will hold a workshop with female and male media artists in November 2000.

David Patton, a Philip Morris Arts Grant recipient, is a musician, painter and performer. In his pieces and performances, he processes sounds and noises taken from his immediate environment. He will attempt in a live performance to play by hand a well-known music title, preserved on an LP, at the appropriate playing speed on a record player. Compared to the precision of the technology, this is a helpless undertaking. But the listener is presented with a completely new version of a well-known title. The copy becomes the original.

Debra A. Solomon: the_living: project brainstorm

For years, scientists have been carrying out research on how to freeze and thaw living humans. This state is called cryostasis and is intended as a means of achieving immortality or delaying impending death from a disease until a treatment for the specific disease can be developed.

How can cryostasis be achieved? The answer lies inside a frog. Every year the frog freezes in the ice of winter and thaws out in the spring and then goes on living. By using the frog as a model, the scientists of the brainstorm project were able to discover a technique to freeze and thaw humans as well. - Simply by putting people into the body of a frozen amphibian.

..................and that is exactly where you are right now: inside the frog!

Let us play through the brainstorm project together:

Inside the frog, you can be a scientist controlling the ambient temperature. Or work out a plan in the family or among friends how to take care of grandmother when she comes out of cryostasis and is awakened in 300 years and you yourself are long dead.

In the playroom of the brainstorm project, the participants are continuously filmed and brought online.

You can use this space for future scenarios.

You can click and play the images that are stored on the computers. In this way, you can develop your own scenario on the topic of cryostasis.

You can click and play the QuickTime movies to see how the scientists of the brainstorm project have developed the technique of freezing and thawing in conjunction with living people.

How did you get inside the frog?

You can take part in a chat online with people who are also developing future scenarios on the topic of cryostasis. Or chat with the scientists of the Brainstorm project in person.

You can take part in a media workshop in which scenarios on the topic of cryostasis are developed together.