FRAGMENTUM

FRAGMENTUM

Immersive art

These images are interactive and immersive; everything is very fast and constantly in flux. A 3D sensor lets the image respond to movement, and a projector casts it onto large walls. The software is developed in house.

The series works with numerous detail views taken from Ikarus. Only a selection is shown here on the website.

FRAGMENTUM works with hierarchies and fragmentary references. The background image is a fragment of an original oil painting. The flowing, racing objects each carry a smaller fragment of that detail. On contact the objects are destroyed and shatter into further fragments. Added to this is the strong dynamism of the fragments themselves.

As in BORDERLESS, the subject is the relation between conceptual and informal creative being in the context of technology. Here it is about setting human and machine against one another - but with a particular eye on the human, unfathomable making of something new, and on the accidental produced by algorithms and withdrawn from human influence: the accident of the computer, wholly enclosed by the conceptual design of the human being.

Where does the human stop, and where does the human remain creative in spite of the machine, without being deprived of the engagement with the things of existence? At what point does the machine begin to steer us, leaving us little influence? That leads quickly to the core questions in dealing with computers and AI.

''On the conceptual level I use AI intensively for programming. It makes things faster and even brings in new ideas. In artistic intelligence I tend to keep my distance from artificial intelligence. I am shaped too strongly by a painterly, traditional sense of art for that. What does generating art with an artificial intelligence give me in my inner engagement? In the end I would only be showing the inside of a machine and taking credit that is not mine. I have no problem using a machine as a tool - it is only a brush. As with working with collage or with the art of others, including in terms of content, it makes sense, when working with what a computer produces, to keep engaging honestly and afresh with that process and with one's own convictions, and to test them for what they are worth to one's own work.'' Tobias Post