The work is site specific, the content and the medium are created taking into account the specific spatial and social context of Rosenheim. Binary code of the message was “written” by parking new, black and silver cars (VW Golfs) into the approx. 100 m long row along the main city square. Drivers one after the other drove the cars into the square so, that something which at the beginning looked as two or three wrongly parked cars grew into the huge parking lot. The cars of two different colours were arranged so that finally the text of a coded message was written along the square. Although probably no one of the passers-by could read it the message attracted great, if not always positive, interest. The whole action-performance of parking cars has been documented on video. (*VHS video) On January 2, 2004 Dalibor Martinis put a sum of money equivalent to 365 shares into the ZB Trend Investment Fund. Since on this day the price of one share in the ZB Trend was 102.22 euros, the amount invested equals 37,310.3 euros. The money was invested with an investment term of one year, i.e., 365 days, and constitutes the funds of the […]
Read More ›
The things one finds wandering in a landscape: familiar things and utterly unknown, like a flower one has never seen before, or, as Columbus discovered, an inexplicable continent; and then, behind a hill, as if knitted by giant grandmothers, lies this vast rabbit, to make you feel as small as a daisy. The toilet-paper-pink creature lies on its back: a rabbit-mountain like Gulliver in Lilliput. Happy you feel as you climb up along its ears, almost falling into its cavernous mouth, to the belly-summit and look out over the pink woolen landscape of the rabbitÌs body, a country dropped from the sky; ears and limbs sneaking into the distance; from its side flowing heart, liver and intestines. Happily in love you step down the decaying corpse, through the wound, now small like a maggot, over woolen kidney and bowel. Happy you leave like the larva that gets its wings from an innocent carcass at the roadside. Such is the happiness which made this rabbit. i love the rabbit the rabbit loves me. After almost 5 years of knitting the rabbit found its final place in the italian alps (close to Cuneo). It waits there to be visited by you. You […]
Read More ›
“The Bureau of Found Appropriations / Département des Sourires” is a work which is part of a long-term study on strategies of appropriation and forms of production (and reproduction) in Asia. My main attention is directed towards differences, misinterpretation and errors committed in the process of translating and copying cultural commodities. How can an image be read, used, interpreted, unterstood without knowing its cultural context? In 2008 I stayed with Matthias Meinharter for three months in southern China working on the art/film project Chinese Whispers in Dafen – the copy capital of art. There, approximately up to 10,000 painters live, work and are specialized in copying work in specific styles by a wide range of masters of historical and contemporary oil-painting. Annually, more than five million paintings are produced at assembly lines, usually copies of masterpieces. The reason why this use of imitations strikes western societies as a serious cultural difference has to do with a strong historical correlation between painting and calligraphy: in China a good copy is often considered as a reward and honour to the technical and compositional skills of the initial inventor and master. Memorization is taught as the manually repeated imitation of an original; hence […]
Read More ›
2009 Reconstruction of a leaked cellphone video of Saddam Hussein’s execution using found comments on the video posted on web forums on the first day of the video’s appearance 8 mins 34 seconds Single channel video projected on black painted surface Black and white, no sound Installation view (see documentation video) This is where we’ll do it #5, 2008 YouTube video that was downloaded, partially erased and uploaded to YouTube again 18 sec loop, black and white, no sound From This is where we’ll do it, series of YouTube videos from which the performing people were erased XXXXXXXXX in the Expanded Field, 2008 Downloaded copy of Rosalind Krauss’ essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ from which all references to art were removed using standard methods of redaction Redistributed pdf, unlimited laser prints
Read More ›
Fünf Monde (Five Moons) Four lightboxes with drawings of a moon mounted on tower cranes at a construction site Installed in Vienna (AT) 2007/08 South Tyrol (IT) 2008/09 Tower cranes, lightboxes, scratch drawings Dimensions variable (lightboxes: 200 x 200 x 25 cm)
Read More ›
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA The work consists of four free-standing walls, which form an interior space made entirely of upside down mass-produced, sentimental landscape paintings. Inside sits a construction made of cardboard, reflective insulation and aluminum foil with a flickering amateur film sequence showing on a household monitor. Material: Metal studs, found oil paintings, poles from tent canopy, cardboard, insulation, furniture and objects, aluminium foil, video monitor. Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, USA
Read More ›
A radio broadcast over Reykjavik during the Sequences festival 2006. The piece delivers 24hour silence, the only guaranty silence you can get in modern society on FM 106,5.
Read More ›
Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo. Murmur Study is an installation that examines the rise of micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter and Facebook’s status update. One might describe these messages as a kind of digital small talk. But unlike water-cooler conversations, these fleeting thoughts are accumulated, archived and digitally-indexed by corporations. While the future of these archives remains to be seen, the sheer volume of publicly accessible personal — often emotional — expression should give us pause. This installation consists of 30 thermal printers that continuously monitor Twitter for new messages containing variations on common emotional utterances. Messages containing hundreds of variations on words such as argh, meh, grrrr, oooo, ewww, and hmph, are printed as an endless waterfall of text accumulating in tangled piles below. The printed thermal receipt paper is then reused in future projects and exhibitions or recycled. http://christopherbaker.net/
Read More ›
