Art
Video: Sylvanas Transformer (2011)
Sylvanas Transformer, 2011, single channel HD video. length: 17 min., color, sound, Edition of 5/+1, courtesy of the artist.
Video: White Transformer (2011)
White Transformer, 2011, single channel HD video. length: 7:15 min., color, sound, Edition of 5/+1, courtesy of the artist.
Red Transformer (2011)
Red Transformer, 2011, single channel HD video. length: 8 min., color, sound, Edition of 5/+1, courtesy of the artist.
Video: Ork Warrior (2011)
Ork Warrior, 2011, single channel HD video. length: 3 min., color, sound, Edition of 5/+1, courtesy of the artist.
Video: Cos I am (2010)
Cos I am , 2011, single channel HD video. length: 6:45 min., color, sound, Edition of 5/+1, courtesy of the artist.
Videoinstallation: Spellbound (2009)
The video installation SPELLBOUND appropriates codes from contemporary global culture, in the form of the entirety of magic spells from the Harry Potter universe. A Chinese magician is confronted with a Japanese magician, both deploying the translated versions of the spells. The protagonists are projected onto two opposite walls in sich a manner that they appear to hover above the ground. Here the meaning of the magic spell as an ancient form of performativity based on language, which is directed towards a unique connection between self and world, is arranged as a poetic failure. The question is raised whether magic spells can be translated at all and which role encoding and decoding of meaning plays for the existence of magic itself.
Spellbound Chinese
Spellbound Japanese
SPELLBOUND (2009) Videoinstallation, 2 HD Projections, 16:9 Video, Audio, 20 min., Edition of 5+1
Video: ILSA Factory Database (2006)
The ILSA initials stand for Industria Linii, Societate Anonima textile factory founded in Timisoara in the early 1920′s. The video was filmed in May 2006 in the abandoned ILSA ( Industria Linii, Societate Anonima) textile factory in Timisoara, Romania. Over the years, the workers have generated a kind of image database consisting of an immense amount of clippings from newspapers, product covers, photographys, posters, labels, postcards and stickers on the walls of numerous rooms throughout the factory complex. The camera traces this odd collection of imagery, which evokes products, people, places and dreams and follows the paths of image arrangement. For example there exists an entire wall made up of cars, another wall groups political figures such as the dictator Ceasescu with He-Man and a Boss advert, thereby ridiculing power relations and machismo. Other imagery shows families from South America juxtaposed with postcards from the Swiss mountains. The camera movement and animation tries to uncover the connections between different images in this veritable database in order to tell a narrative fueled by the rich imagination of the factory workers at ILSA.
ILSA Factory Database, 2006, DVD Video, 6 minutes, Edition of 5, courtesy of the artist.
Video: Boys in the Hood (2005)
The Video Boys in the Hood consists of interviews with players of the controversial computer game Grand Theft Auto.The players deliver their perspective of the narrative space of the game by giving detailed descriptions of locations, movements and actions in the game. These subjective accounts of a shared space lead to a diffusion of the borders between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’.
Boys in The Hood, 2005, DVD Video, 60 minutes, Edition of 5, courtesy of the artist.
Video: Goldfarmer (2008)
The video Goldfarmer addresses contemporary economical and cultural transformations by interviewing a so called goldfarmer, the player of a popular online game who generates an income by playing. The player has been rendered anonymous by digitally adding the avatar he embodies in the game environment over his face. The phenomenon of goldfarming, that has become a viable form of work, specifically in Asian countries, is used as a model to engage with the transformation of the border between work and play that seems to be characterised by the current dominance of economical paradigms over all other areas of life.
GOLDFARMER (2008) Video, DVD PAL, 16:9, 15 min., Edition of 5+1, courtesy of the artist and Jim & Mary Barr Collection
Video: PSX Warriors: Gran Turismo (2001)
The piece PSX-Warriors GRAN TURISMO is a portrait of a young woman playing a popular racing game. The whole gameplay is visible on the ”Inter-face” of the player. Her reactions, facial expressions and movements translate the qualities of the virtual gamespace. Every action in the digital environment of the game is followed by a little movement of her body. These traces of movement are stronger with people who are new to the immersive spaces of computer- games. Players that are used to games do not move much, they have learnt to constrain their movement to their fingertips on the gamepad. The human side of the interface is used as a screen for the abstract space produced by the game.
PSX Warriors Gran Turismo, 2001, DVD Video, 3 minutes, Edition of 5, courtesy of the artist and Jim & Mary Barr Collection
Video: Brilliant City (2004)
The film Brilliant City was produced during a stay in Shanghai with D-Fuse as part of the British Council Artist Link Program. The title refers to the name of the location, a residential complex comprised of 25 high-rises in the northern part of Shanghai. It is entirely shot from the 34th floor of one of the buildings and stages a peeping tom view of the surrounding city, capturing everyday activities that can be observed from this vantage point – training soldiers, building activity, traffic, gardening. The camera hovers above the entire panorama and focuses on details in the surrounding urban fabric.The film reacts to a particular visual paradigm, which is well known from strategy and simulation computer games (Sim City, The Sims) as the so called God View.It is the distanced perspective usually taken on by city planners, game players or politicians. In these situations people turn from individuals into patterns of movement and symbolic activity, and the viewer is turned into an accomplice of the visual apparatus and the power relations it signifies.
Brilliant City, 2005, DVD Video, 12 minutes, courtesy of D-Fuse
Concept & Camera: Axel Stockburger, Sound: Mathias Kispert, Still Imagery: Mike Faulkner.
Installation: GO (2005)
The Videoinstallation GO is recreation of one round of the ancient asian game GO that has been filmed in a public park in Shanghai. GO highlights the specific spatial structure that emerges from the territorial rules of the game.
Exhibition views, Axel Stockburger: Spielraum, Praxis Gallery, Vienna, Feb. 2005.
GO, Video Installation, MDF Box 150 cm x 100 cm x 70 cm, Plasma TV, DVD 30 min. courtesy of the artist.
Video: Aleph Series – Love, Hate (2004)
The videos Love and Hate are part of a series of works under the collective title Aleph, that has been started in the year 2000. The title refers to a short story by J.L.Borges, which describes the discovery of the curious phenomenon of the Aleph. It is a spaceless space that can only be seen from the stairs leading to the cellar of a friend of the writer, but it simultaenously opens up an access to the whole universe of visual information. The Aleph is described as a source of an immense richess of information which makes it impossible to represent it or capture it in words. It fascinates and captivates the writer in such a way that it makes it impossible for him to keep up his work. The Aleph videos Love and Hate consist entirely of images downloaded from the internet that have been given the respective titles of Love or Hate. A whole world of the most diverse images is grouped by these language concepts. From people to books, animals, objects, landscapes, works of art to pornography it seems that the whole universe of human pattern recognition and meaning is present. 25 images are shown per second which goes beyond the borders of human visual perception, thereby creating a stream of images that cannot be fully decoded or understood.
Marcel Broodthaer’s famous Museum of Eagles, in which he grouped images and objects from the most diverse fields of life that based on their reference to the word eagle can be seen as a very early attempt to question structuring of information. Since this early encounter, machines and programs have been developed to make sense within a universe of signification. Google could be seen as one of the most recent attempts to channel this universe of meaning. The Aleph series is questioning the relation between abstract concepts and language on the one hand and the sheer explosion of visual information on the other hand. It is at once an attempt in vain to fix and grasp something that cannot be pinned down, like the attempt to start drinking the seas dry.
Hate , 2003, DVD Video, 3 minutes, Edition of 5, courtesy of the artist
Love , 2003, DVD Video, 3 minutes, Edition of 5, courtesy of the artist
Video: we accept (2003)
The video We Accept is part of a series of short films entitled the Aleph series, consisting entirely of images downloaded from the Internet. All of these short videopieces target the selection and processing of visual information on a systemic level, regarding the logical structure of search programs and webbrowsers, as well as human perceptive capabilities. About 10000 images have been selected according to their filename (“credit card”) and turned into a single frame animation. Images are selected and combined according to their referential context: the title that has been chosen when the image was saved. The sequential animation of all these images in a film represents the vast context of images subsumed to a language based category. Images advertising and symbolising different credit cards and virtual payment systems have become a visual undercurrent of the contemporary state of the world wide web. In “We Accept” they have been taken from the sites and form the content of the video.
We Accept, 2003, DVD Video, 3 minutes, Edition of 5,
Sound: Kid 606: Ass Sratch Fever,
courtesy of the artist.
The video also appears on the D-Fuse D-Tonate DVD.