Monthly Archive for February, 2011

WOPPOW @ transmediale11

A Berlin-Mitte concept store, a sweatshop at Haus der Kulturen… übermorgen embraces the capital of young creative fashion, right after Berlin fashion week, by unveiling their WOPPOW collection at the 2011 Transmediale exhibition. WOPPOW functions as an elaborate fashion marketing campaign for Somali pirates. ubermorgen.com is run by lizvlx and Hans Bernhard, an artist duo living in Vienna. They went all the way for this project, visited sites of piracy, and joined forces with kenian fashion designer Otieno Gomba.

At the Transmediale we met Gomba and Hans…

Interview: Franziska Mayr Keber
Camera: Andreas muk Haider
Edit: Andreas muk Haider

Secrets Trilogy by Reynold Reynolds @tm11

The exhibition opened with the transmediale 2011 and runs until 3.4.2011. He told me that the exhibition space will function as a studio also where he is going to work on a new shooting series while the public can watch him and his team in progress. If you are in berlin by that time, you should not miss it. I had the pleasure to get Reynold Reynolds under the tagR.umbrella to talk about his work.

Black reflections. Nanoart by Frederik De Wilde @ ars electronica 2010

Frederik de Wilde likes black art. At Ars Electronica 2010 he showed a patch of the blackest black ever, a nano-structured material that absorbs 99.97% of the incident light, winning him the “[the next idea] voestalpine Art and Technology Grant”. He envisions a bright future for the material, with applications ranging from superblack magneto-levitated cubes to increasingly large patches that might finally allow the observer to get immersed in infinite darkness.

For now, De Wilde leaves us in the dark in other ways: In an interview with derstandard.at, he impishly refuses to explain the details of how the trick works, pointing out that Rembrandt and Picasso didn’t publish their color recipes either. The scientists of Prof. Lin’s group at Rice University who developed the material did publish their findings, albeit in a closed-access journal. Probably they also filed a patent. German newspaper Die Zeit has a story on how British scientists discovered the material in the wings of a butterfly. Later, this feat of nature was mimicked using nanofabrication techniques in a Houston cleanroom.

In the exhibition space, the material is covered by plexiglass since dust particles would quickly degrade its properties. The glass surface however creates quite strong reflections, indeed reminding us of a Rembrandt painting hidden behind security glass in a carelessly illuminated museum. A prototype problem only, says De Wilde, to be solved by further research.

In our interview, quantum physicist Tobias Nöbauer finds out more about the physical principle and artistic concepts behind De Wilde’s work: How are the incident photons being treated? What’s the artist’s approach to taking a nano-material from the cleanroom into the exhibition space? Art as alchemy, uncontrolled reflections, whispering black magic? There’s a new shade of nano on the artistic reasearcher’s color palette: What do we get shown?

Interview: Tobias Nöbauer
Camera: Franziska Mayr-Keber
Editing: Sophie-Carolin Wagner

exclusive interview: anonymous at transmediale

exclusive interview with ?anonymous? at the transmediale, talking about the secret shit behind the scenes of #tm11. if this is true it will be a big disaster. recorded at haus der kulturen der welt 6.2.2011

Interview with Friedrich Lindenberg / Liquid Democracy e. V

Uncut Interview with Friedrich Lindenberg from the Liquid Democracy e.V talking to Tobias Nöbauer & Volker Eckl from “Transforming Freedom”; second part (off the records) in german language, starting at 27:00. Recorded at the Transmediale 2011 in Berlin (feb. 5th 2011) by georg schütz.

tm.11 walk with peter moosgaard

ambient impressions from this years transmediale festival in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

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