Ever since the reality principle was absorbed by a simulation principle and reality has been the realisation of the fictive itself, it has seemed as if art can now only proceed in an anti-fictional manner. The unfathomability, the fleeting nature and the openness of the algorithmic image, for which Peter Lunefeld found the term »aesthetics of the unfinished«,1 have raised questions about a specific aesthetic for digital visual techniques.2 How are visual artistic strategies affected by the new media, and what specific logic is inherent in them? Precisely in view of far-reaching simulation theories, non-representative trends in the digital media are coming increasingly into the foreground.3 At the intersection of abstraction and new media, the code underlying the digital images is becoming a form that can be aesthetically exploited.

Since the end of the nineties, the media artists Holger Mader and Alexander Stublic and the architect Heike Wiermann have been addressing these questions in their video and media installations. Their media sculpture »cube« (2001) interrogates conventional visual concepts through a juxtaposition of classical video and abstract formal language.4 The cuboid object is an interface upon which abstract video sequences are shown that present the interaction of light and form in manifold variations.5 Since modernity, abstract art has made the act of creating images, the image and its devices the actual subject of the art work in a self-reflexive treatment. The moving image, which has been extended by the factor of the image-time relation, is the final consequence following the logic of an aesthetic development.6 The abstract video images on the »cube« develop a momentum that overcomes the formal limits of the sculpture, a momentum deriving from the continually changing image surfaces and their pulsating display of forms. The multiple projections onto a real object lead to a detachment of the multi-media choreography from the two-dimensional visual space: the abstract visual formations, together with the acoustic composition, are an integral component of a synaesthetic process.7 In its intermedial extension of the cinematographic, the installation brings about an »aesthetic of complexity«8 through the various sensory stimuli. »cube« thus is not only a work situated in the tradition of »expanded cinema«9, but also opens up complex systems of reference and associations by assimilating the canon of abstract art. The structural combination of image, sound and movement deconstructs the shape of the cube and explores relations between form and meaning beyond the medial image façades. This principle is what sets »cube« apart from the contemporary multimedia installations that follow in the abstract tradition. »syn chron« (2005) by Carsten Nicolai, for example, also defines itself by means of the interaction of structures, surfaces and sound in space, but is more a membrane or a sounding board than an image carrier: here, sound frequencies generate abstract light events that are projected by laser beams onto the translucent outer skin of the walk-through crystalline object.

If abstract art is seen as self-referential owing to its non-representative contents and if the possibilities digitally produced art has of creating references are taken into account in this definition, then the media installations by Holger Mader, Alexander Stublic and Heike Wiermann interrogate the relationship of modernity to the latest digital image productions. This would mean that the medial qualities of a digital image shape its appearance. The latest production by these three artists, »core« (2005), proves this assumption by the two-dimensionality of the interface, the different layers of electronic »material« and the animation possibilities of the software. The manner of seeing and being visible is organised in media systems. The images that cover the vertical object body in »core« are characteristic of such »intermedial figurations« that are »primarily structured by their medial arrangement«.10 In comparison with »cube«, they have become even more complex owing to the specific difference between filmic video technology and computer-generated video. These two methods are superimposed on one another in this work. The deployment of an object in space here goes beyond the relativising relationship between video and sculpture. It is indispensable for linking different temporalities to the object in the space. The starting point for the film display, which, as in »cube«, is linear and of a specific duration, is footage that captures the materiality of the sculpture and its illumination by a point of light. The video recording contains remnants of the authentic owing to its past reference to the object. This light show interferes with a live generated video that concretely refers to the real object situated there. The abstract coloured shapes derive their visual presence not from the imprint of the light reflexes, but are rather an expression of programmed surfaces. The combination of the two displays creates different tensions that condense to form various compositions. For a short time, these compositions are held at a multi-layered stage, before they disappear once more. In contrast to the synthetically rigorous video display of the »cube«, the filmic light show and its translucent spatiality charge the object with a narrative component, while the abstract coloured shapes imposed on it reduce this factor and make both principles seem of equal weight.

The reflection on conditions of medial perception and on medial spaces, and the paradigm of new image production are promoted by amimetic strategies; qualities of difference between technology and form are explored. Mediality itself becomes an event and is confronted by the digital reality of the electronic media. As the effect of a construction of human perception, technological apparatus and cultural gaze, medial reality has long been an »ontological hermaphrodite, a fragile formation beyond appearance and reality«. Most of the images we have to do with today have been detached from traditional image carriers. They are not representations, but technologically processed phenomena. As technological images, they represent »iconisations of calculations«12 that enter the area of complete lack of referentiality. »cube« and »core« are among the image-sound configurations that have assimilated scenarios of self-generating information. Consequently, they operate on the terrain of hybrid »quasi-objects«, a term Bruno Latour has suggested for all the medial processes that do not allow a definite classifications and take their own path between technology, nature and society.13

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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