Time Mutations/Artworks

Matthias Breuer – Reconstructing the Truth

Reconstructing the Truth

Nowadays reality is a highly constructed body made up of many different ideas, desires and influences. The biggest reality-producing machine, the media with all its different distribution channels, confronts us with a huge colourfulmoving mass made up of countless pictures and sounds. The question about whether what we see is real or not is neither asked nor encouraged. The catchphrase of modernity is see it and believe it, critical discourse is never held. While in ancient times, following Plato's ideas, reality to some is the dancing of shadows on a cave wall, for us it is the interplay of many differently coloured pixels on flat surfaces. Screens are our viewfinders to the world. Our perception is created by artificial interfaces. The connection between reality and man is created by copper wires and silicon plates. A very fragile umbilical cord highly dependent on those who feed it thus holding the ultimate control.

Two movies dealing about the question of what is real, The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowski brothers and World on Wires (1973, orig. title Welt am Draht) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, are left to the electronic brain of a computer to create, with its countless circuits instructed by a programmer, a reality partly constructed partly real to explore reality and its constructed nature. The outcome is a formal critique of (mass-)media's reality.

Full documentation

Carl Lee – Last house

Carl Lee - Last house

(2010, 3-channel HD video, stereo sound, 16:30 loop)

When I first moved to Buffalo, NY I was struck by the everyday beauty of the many single-family homes that make up the city. These iconic, turn-of-the-century houses seemed to have endless interpretation. Each structure with its unique details, angles, and arrangements was like a variation on a theme or an instance of an archetype, with its own singular history handed down from deed to deed.

At the same time, Buffalo numbers among the many rust-belt cities dealing with decades-long economic decline and its concomitant depopulation. As a result, vacant and abandoned houses abound. Thousands have been torn down and many more await a similar fate. Empty windows stare out from the last house standing on the block. They wait like a question posed, or a reminder.

If houses are containers for our memories, the structures within which so many minor and major domestic events take place, then each week in this city a collective amnesia grows block by block: a city disappears before our eyes. The demolition of these structures—by design or accident—and the speed, indifference and violence with which it takes place, the transmutations of scale, of space, and even of one's sense of time is breathtaking, tragic, and full of contradictions. Last House is an inquiry, part document, part memorial, into this changing built environment.

See artist's website for more information

Stephanie Rothenberg – School of Perpetual Training

Stephanie Rothenberg - School of Perpetual Training

School of Perpetual Training is an ironic instructional training program that exposes the underbelly and not so glamorous side of the computer video game industry. Most people associate jobs in the computer video game industry with information-based labor such as 3D graphics and coding game programs. Yet the majority of the industry relies on the sweat and stamina of migrant and low-income laborers working for electronics contract manufacturers in developing countries.

By following a series of training exercises, participants learn about the precarious employment and unjust labor conditions of workers in the areas of overseas digital game manufacturing and distribution. A virtual “personal trainer” created in Second Life leads participants through a series of training exercises that use motion detection and require full range of body motion to play. Rather than using a mouse or joystick, the motion detection demands the participants “labor” to complete the training exercises, emphasizing the extreme physical nature and motion economics of these jobs. The individual training exercises recontextualize popular classic arcade games – Dig Dug, Tapper, Space Invaders and Tetris – in order to “train” participants for jobs in mineral mining, printed circuit board assembly, box build and global shipping. At the end of the training program, participants can gauge their “global market value” to find out how much they are “worth” in contrast to white-collar workers in the industry and game company profits.

Try the project online