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Flow
'Charly Steiger
Charly Steiger
FLOW DATA Media systems: the collection and distribution of data, discoveries and the administration of runtimes and speeds, the measurement and bridging of distances. We believe that we are going in one direction, our goal in sight – but which way is the river of data flowing? Which systems are connected? Where is their input; where is their output? Who is in control? Who is interpreting?
An important area of interest in media technologies has focused on the linking of various systems: How can television and interactive videotext be coupled, what about language recognition and telecommunications, assembly line inspection and the improved adjustment of robot efficiency? Connections, links – interruption, disconnection – the question of what the axioms are, which rules of linkage they define, and how they can be imagined, intended and conceptualized becomes more and more urgent. Do data-processing technologies lead solely to the creation and duplication of artificial worlds of images, or can a conceptualization arrived at from images of social relevance precede the systems? And, who will achieve this conceptualization? Which images will precede it?
At present, the world now being created is even less able to produce its interpretation on the basis of a singular object than before. Now, the object can no longer be considered the only example of its type (media or genetic) with certainty, our behavior, our perception at the location of the putative or actual event (situ) again becomes the object of active interest.
For this reason, the artistic problem of representing the world concentrates only in exceptions on the problem of using an object to represent a concept. On the contrary, the creation of situations that demand the description of pointedly chosen systems within systems superordinate to them by means of adjustment and contrast is the more important issue.FLOW VIDEO INSTALLATION Two areas of information: a projection area with a six-part projected frieze and, below it, a stairway located in the Brucknerhaus that is equipped with six light barriers.
Each movement sensor is connected to a separate video projector, so that when one steps onto the stairway, the formal presentation of the projection – a mutated television image that has been compressed into a band – is changed according to the height of the corresponding projector. This projection contains an altered input and swings, for the duration of the step, from a horizontal to a vertical position.
Both the people passing by the projected frieze on the gallery above the staircase and the person on the stairs will be unable to clearly interpret their effect on the system at the moment that the event occurs. The coupling of movement to the change in the projected images will be obvious to the user on the gallery as a systematic unit after a certain time of observation, just as the person on the stairs will interpret his or her influence on the projection system after having assumed the position of observer.
The installation does not interpret the concept of "interaction" between man and machine as an instantaneous, direct system of stimulus and reaction, but as a multi-layered coupling of technical control and human observation, of the immediate processing of electronic data and processes of observing the self and the environment, which is based on time and interpretation. Understanding the entire system and an individual's own function within it is not possible without mutual perception of differing levels of information.CHARLY STEIGER / ACHIM WOLLSCHEID I would like to thank Mike Krebs from TVT, Frankfurt; Bernd Geisler from viteg, Neu-Anspach, and Delta-System Studioanlagen, Rödermark for their kind help.
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