Syndicate: body of the message - invitation

[Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>]

PRESS RELEASE

Ortsbegehung 4 - body of the message
Sandra Becker ? Blank & Jeron ? Daniel Pflumm
curated by Inke Arns

4 July - 16 August 1998

check now the URL for body of the message:
<http://www.snafu.de/~inke/NBK/body.html>


The Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is now showing the fourth exhibition in the
Ortsbegehung (?site inspection?) series: an annual presentation of
contemporary positions in new art featuring three representatives from
Berlin. We place each of these projects in the hands of guest curators in
order to guarantee the necessary pluralism of opinion, and do justice to
the varying approaches possible in view of a diverse spectrum of artistic
observation, experience and conclusions. After the first three ?Site
Inspections? of the past years, the fourth presentation now organized by
curator Inke Arns is titled body of the message, and features installations
deploying new electronic media -- video, computer, Internet.

The works to be premiered in the exhibition by Sandra Becker, Daniel Pflumm
and Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron are linked by a common interest in the
radical re-structuring/re-invention of public space currently in progress.
Although invisible to the human eye, the process has far-reaching
implications. The works are concerned with those new types of media
structures that, as nomadic and ephemeral extensions, graft themselves onto
our public spaces, and qualitatively change them -- in a political sense,
too. The artists strive to make visible the unseen motion in these new
urban spaces of transit, to visualize specific streams of signs,
merchandise, bodies and information -- those elements, in other words, that
are in transit through these new territories. The term ?body of the
message? comes from the field of e-mail communications, where it
desig-nates that part of an electronic message addressed to a human reader
as opposed to the program code directed to the machine.

Becker, Pflumm, and Blank & Jeron choose approaches which scrutinize
various aspects of ?message bodies? in contemporary mediatized urban
spaces: the movements by people in these spaces; the fluctuation of
signifying bodies, as well as the increasing digitization (i.e. the radical
reduction) of bodies that, until now analog, are caught up in a process of
transition into the realm of information.

The positions represented in body of the message are ones of a generation
of artists that uses new media as part of its ?natural? environment, so to
speak, and therefore does not need to explicitly labour the concept of
?media art?, in part even rejects this notion. They work with a minimum of
technical expenditure (consumer technology), and have no need of a large
battery of machines -- in contrast to the spectacular works of media art
meantime canonized in the museums.

For her work metro scan (4 videos, combined with large format
photographies, 1998) Sandra Becker uses recorded images of passers-by in
the subways of New York, Berlin, Moscow and Tokyo. The ?message bodies?
shown to us by Becker are obviously ?real?: human bodies in motion,
standing on escalators, rushing in their hundreds along subway passages.
Although Sandra Becker is citing in her work the aesthetic of public
surveillance cameras, she immediately subverts the normative distanced
totality of this view by adopting a number of standpoints. It is de
Certeau?s metaphorical or migrational city that one encounters in her works.

In Daniel Pflumm?s ?minimalist? video (1998) the ?message bodies? are
reduced to the ?glossy veneer? of pure surfaces: colourful logos, corporate
identities and brandnames frenetically alternate with each other. These
?message bodies? point to supra-individual, multi-national corporations,
geographically distributed enterprises making products sold worldwide in a
globalized economy, and therefore requiring images that are globally
recognizable. These control characters pass through the urban realm and
collective global subconscious, indicating in passing the velocity of an
almost instantaneous world-wide presence. At the same time, there is
something especially fragile and transient about those logos the artist
?censored? or ?de-cored? -- stripped of all text and reduced to their
minimal graphic form. Daniel Pflumm?s videos are archives recording the
rapid transformations in advertising and media aesthetics.

Scanner++ (12 scanners, computer, video projection, Internet, 1998) by
Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron is a hybrid project that incorporates the
Internet at the same time as it extends into ?real? space by means of an
interactive installation. Via a ?walk-on? scanner, ?real? bodies enter the
virtual realm, their physical mass becomes information, ?traces of bodies?;
compatible, globally retrievable and archivable <http://sero.org>. The
principle of the search engine, actually an industrious, invisible software
program scouring the Internet for information, is here lent almost
obscenely material form as a symptomatic object now superimposed over real
space, which it proceeds to systematically scan. Blank & Jeron ironically
blur the narrow precipice separating information from disinformation, and
with their contribution they question the ? "true" value of information in
our society?.

A bilingual catalogue (German / English) will be published (18 DM, 64 p.,
many illustrations, full colour; with texts by Inke Arns, Ralph Lindner,
Gerrit Gohlke, Thilo Wermke).

We would like to invite you for a press preview of the exhibition, which
will take place at 11 a.m. on the day of the opening (3 July 1998). The
artists and the curator of body of the message will be present between 11
a.m. and 1 p.m.


With kind support from
Hitachi Business Systems Division, Duesseldorf
and
Jet-Foto, Berlin


ORTSBEGEHUNG 4 - body of the message
Sandra Becker ? Blank & Jeron ? Daniel Pflumm
curated by Inke Arns

4 July - 16 August 1998

Opening: Friday, 3 July 1998, 7 p.m.

Opening hours:
Tuesday - Friday 12 - 6 p.m.
Saturday + Sunday 12 - 4 p.m.

Neuer Berliner Kunstverein
Chausseestrasse 128/129
10115 Berlin (Mitte), Germany
Tel ++49 - (0)30 - 280 70 20
Fax ++49 - (0)30 - 280 70 19
e-mail: <nbk@berlin.snafu.de>
URL: <www.nbk.org> (soon to come)

Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de>
URL for body of the message: <www.snafu.de/~inke/NBK/body.html>


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