To make “Wave Catcher,” the film crew traveled through the northern Ruhr District from November 2009 to March 2010. The selection of shooting locations was made primarily on the basis of acoustic rather than visual criteria. Various situations that come up in everyday life were filmed with both the real ambient sounds audible on site and the electromagnetic sounds received at the same location. The countless traffic arteries and train stations alternate with hidden corners of the inner city, public buildings, construction sites, power plants, high-tension lines, security systems, shopping malls, collections in museums, industrial wastelands, waiting rooms and the occasionally idyllic surrounding countryside. The various sound strata give rise to a discrepancy of perception that calls into question what is familiar and well-known.

Konzept, Regie und elektromagnetische Tonaufnahmen: Christina Kubisch (DE)
Kamera und Schnitt: Peter Simon (DE)
Sound: Eckehard Güther (DE)

This work was commissioned in the context of the project mapping the region for RUHR2010/European cultural capital 2010 by the sculpture museum of Marl and was presented there first in spring 2010.

A selection of 40 photographs Christina Kubisch took during her travels through the Ruhrgebiet are mounted—arranged in no particular order—on a wall. Just like a visitor to a museum, everyone partaking of these works is issued an audio guide; entering the ID number of a particular image launches the playback of the soundscape that belongs to the image. However, this is not the acoustic sound of the location but rather its magnetic sound. The locations are likewise marked in the form of numbers on a map of the northern Ruhr District. Like participants in a treasure hunt, installation visitors seek, localize and pair the images and the sounds. The sounds are softly transported around the installation space and continually remixed by the open loudspeaker system of the audio guides.

This work was commissioned in the context of the project mapping the region for RUHR2010/European cultural capital 2010 by the sculpture museum of Marl and was presented there first in spring 2010.

112 persons from 56 countries convened at the Table of Free Voices in Berlin in 2006 to provide answers to global questions about such things as the economy, ethics, war and nation-states. Now, director Ralf Schmerberg has made a film out of the resulting 11,200 statements interwoven with footage of some of the defining images of our time. The result is major intellectual marathon.

www.droppingknowledge.org

Regie: Ralf Schmerberg (DE) (Mindpirates e.v.)

After his first work, a sunflower-shaped robot called „Himawari“ (2008), artist and visual designer Akira Nakayasu continued his research in the field of robotic plants. His latest worked, simply called „plant“, is an interactive installation inspired by the vision of grass blowing in the wind. The robotic plant has 169 artificial leaves, which are controlled by using shape memory alloy actuators. Each leaf reacts independently to movement like an approaching hand by moving slowly in the virtual wind.

Chris Jordan looks critically at the dark side of our global mass production and consumption society. It is hard to communicate the environmental impact our way of life has on the planet, because most phenomena are invisible and spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses. His work “Gyre” depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic in his image was collected from the Pacific Ocean.

http://www.chrisjordan.com

Access to healthy drinking water is a basic right, but also a technical and social challenge. Accordingly, experts in technology, biology, medicine, art and design collaborated on the development of the Quelle 01 (Spring 01) drinking water purification system. It takes local tap water, physically and chemically purifies it, and delivers water as if from a natural spring. The assignment was to achieve consummate drinking water quality, and to use local sources of water worldwide in order to avoid unnecessary transportation, cleaning and recycling of bottles. The outcome is to bring technology, nature and life into harmony in a way that has great future promise. Three of these devices will be exhibited at Ars Electronica.

http://www.quellsysteme.de