The Man And The Ocean / Der Mensch und das Meer - English Description
“It's glorious, to be in an infinite solitude at the sea shore under cloudy skies and to look out at the unlimited desert of the sea” (Heinrich von Kleist)”
The man and the ocean are facing each other. The night is falling and the waves are sweeping. The mighty, gray-violet, almost non structural sky is getting darker and darker. In relation to his environment and the overwhelming spectacle of nature the man seems to be little, lonely and void.
“The Man and The Ocean” deals with the interaction between man and machine respectively media. If anyone enters the space in which the installation takes place and stays for more than five seconds a little man starts to appear in the videoimage, walks next to the sea and stays there as long as the beholder takes his time to watch the video.
The three following .gif-files show the three states of the videoimage:
Media:Meer.gif
Media:Mensch.gif
Media:MenschundMeer.gif
The work is based on a written academic essay on “Rezeptionsästhetik”. The aesthetic of reception is a former theory by the literature that made its way to the science of art. It deals with the function and position of a beholder. The idea is: The function of a beholder is defined by any artwork itself.
A human beholder inside a picture was used a lot in the romantic painting. In particular to show the dignity of nature compared to man. One famous painting showing this is Caspar David Friedrich's work “The Monk By The Sea”.
“The Man and The Ocean” reenacts and recreates this situation in an interactive digital context where the experience of nature and its dignity meets.
Audio and video files for this setup: Media:2013 03 31 MenschundMeer 1.0.zip
Schall-Wasser-Tanz/Sonic-Water-Dance (unfinished)
A year ago I worked on the interaction of water and sound. Both together create a great visual experience. With Pure Data and Eyecon it now reaches a new level which was a year ago only developed as a concept.
The core of the work is that the structure of the water gets sharper if the pitch of the sonic rises higher.
<videoflash type="vimeo">39511880|500|280</videoflash>
About the concept in short: A camera is filming water that will be moved by the sound of a loudspeaker. That will be projected by a beamer in a dark room to a wall. If a person enters the room the sonic will be activated and the projected water will get a structure. If the person is moving to the picture on the wall the pitch of the sound will rise and the structure of the water gets sharper.
The work is at the moment based on mtion tracking with Eyecon and Pure Data.