We all know the problem: You just made up a brilliant image for your city (for example Barcelona) that attracts tourists, trade shows and the global community’s attention. But suddenly, with all this attention you realize that the image you have developed with so much hard work does not reflect the actual reality. So you start modifying it.
As one tiny detail of this plan, you have to make sure that the public space is clean, nice and free of possible negative influences to the idealized tourists and foreign visitors. Basically, you have to get rid of some of the most annoying inhabitants of public spaces. How to do this? Well, I propose an easy to follow three step approach:

Identify: First you need to detect the place where the unwanted public activity takes place.

Design: Think about an effective way of imposing the citizen’s behavior.

Install: Now you can apply the measure to the problematic space and transform its function.

Voilà, you are done!
Now let’s all go out there and destroy another public space!

Just for your information: I have taken these pictures at carrer San Pau, Barcelona (check the Google Street View)

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I am very proud to announce that my video 60” with costa rican choreographer Sandra Trejos is part of an exhibition at the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica.
It is presented as a monochannel videoinstallation at this year’s Iberoamerican Bienal of Videocreation and Digital Art.
Unfortunately and due to bureaucratic reasons, only Sandra appears in the credits.

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Closed circuit television (cctv) can be considered as the symbolic incarnation of surveillance and control of habits in public spaces.

Since the whole topic concerns me a lot, I was delighted to find a copyleft-picture of a banksy-stencil on flickr. And – within one afternoon – I brought this great conceptual idea to motion.

The underlying sound collage is based on samples by suonho and the whole clip is licensed under the creative commons license.

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Feed, Performance for Unreal Characters, Fog, Stroboscopes & Pulse Lights by Kurt Hentschlager at Sónar 2007

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You are sitting inside a huge dark cube. There is no light except the projection of floating bodies. They are asexual and neither have eyes nor mouths in their faces. You hear grime and rhythmic sub-bass sounds and the dime lights on the screen flicker according to these audio incentives.

Their bodies are constantly forced to move, as if they received electric shocks, every three or four seconds. You have read before that the whole performance will last about 50 minutes, so you analyse every repetitive movement – a flow of conceptual associations starts to circulate around ideas of “primordial soup”, reproduction, control, representation, cloning, video-graphic games and media history.

Suddenly everything changes – the bodies disappear and the whole cube is covered with thick, artificial fog. Now you are the bodies. You are not able to see anything, not even your own hands in front of your face. You notice that some people leave the cube. You remember you had to sign a paper that you do not suffer claustrophobia, epilepsy and similar physical disorders. Before you get used to this completely immersive environment, cruel light-shots start to invade your visual senses. They fill the whole smoke and hit you with a stroboscopic frequency of 25, 30 per second, probably, you just realize that it is to fast for your perception.

The white space you perceive has no spatial representation, it is rather inside your head than in front of your eyes. You remember the childhood’s nightmares you could never explain, because they were just a weird and uncomfortable feeling. Finally, you get to realise what this feeling is like. You analyze it: It consists of the lack of orientation, the absolute absence of space. The cube around you becomes nothing, a „none“-space. You have lost your visual senses, the external forces reach directly your head.

From one moment to the other everything gets to an end. All you see is just black. Silence. You still smell the fog, but you know that it’s over.

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Estos dias estoy trabajando en una instalación de video para Dixon. Este artista de street art va a exponer en la galeria distritoQuinto (mapa). Su exposición se llama “mujeres y niños primero!” y la inauguración será el 27 de abril 2007.

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Right now I am working on a video installation for Dixon. This Street Artist inaugurates his exposition “Women and children first!” on April 27th 2007 at the distritoQuinto gallery (map).

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yesterday i came back from switzerland, where i have been around for the last 10 days. costa rican choreographer and dancer sandra trejos from diquis tiquis had invited me to visit her in biel, to realize some audiovisual projects.

and so we did: pasaporte basel is the first finished proyect. it consists of various passport photos of sandra, taken 10 years ago in basel. if you move the mouse over the photo, it will morph through time and show a photo of her again, taken at the same place with the same machine.

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The German architect and urban artist Aram Bartholl presented some of his projects at the Ars Electronica Brucknerhaus. Both deal in a nice way with the simplicity/complexity topic.

Random Screen is a flickering pixel display that works completely without electricity. 25 Beer cans and 25 tea lights are put together in a certain way to create the turning light-sources.

Papierpixel follows a similar approach, but in this case the analogue display can actually be used to show letters, numbers or little graphics – everything that fits on a 8×8 pixel matrix. There is an electric light that illuminates the display from the back and a mechanism similar to a hand organ that shows the light only to certain pixels.

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