(photocredit homepage: Alex Adler 2010)
The Diaries of Johanson
During my research on the probability of the Absolute, I met Johanson Johan Johan. It remains unclear when Johan was born.
Some say he was depicted in the year 1888. He introduced me to the Geigercounter, an instrument echoing the cosmic symphony
of nuclear decay. I have the pleasure to present you his diaries:
august iii: i dream that i am frozen inside a monolith, an ocean of stone melting in time.
august vi: i am living in a forest, sending millions of equations towards the grid of forensic financial probability.
the materialistic resonance of harvested energy. i encounter a singularity: the financial grid is connected to inverse nuclear motion.
december vii: a milky way night in swabia, germany. a frozen desert of ice. i wake up knowing that i will have to tattoo three dots
forming a triangle onto the skin of my right hand.
march viii: i have found my target. i need to harvest a nuclear tree in the red forest next to the chernobyl nuclear reactor,a contaminated canvas painted with the invisible colors of nightmares.
april viii: i see a large bronze statue of shiva, dancing in a ring of fire. this shiva is located far from home in the town meyrin above the large hadron collider ring at cern. how did he get here to switzerland? wasn't he supposed to have blue skin? i am going down. a very fast and smooth elevator. there i find the blue skin: on the collider body. i touch it with my right hand, the three dots are in contact with the void. it is cold. the mother machine has already served it's purpose.
august viii: i have received a new object of wonder and desire, a geigercounter: an occult fetish of fear. it will help me to trace the light. light never worms. so strong it can reverse time. time, the destroyer of worlds.
september viii: kiev. casinos. gambling. a hallucination of luxor. archangels and golden glyphs of fortune: triples of 7: 777 written on the shiny facade of probability. i take a picture.
september viii: the chernobyl reactor block. 6.65 ... 6.67. nothing in between. not much at all. science cannot measure evil. the geigercounter device may only work like an instrument in the hands of the poet.
september viii: fall. i transported the nuclear tree to montreal showing it in the financial district. a nuclear zen garden. red light from the future dividing our past. red shift. forgotten oracle. i send the image of casino 777 to cecile. they reboot the collider-ring in meyrin, geneva. the next day, the dow jones industrial index looses 777 points. a crash they say, rather it is a redistribution from the bottom to the top, a new pyramid. the amplified financial cascade is connected to the nuclear equation, the invisible side of the materialistic coin. another 1 dusts the bit as another 1 bites the dust. the devil is booting up the fin(anci)al bomb. i found the equation in the forest. parameters of paradise.
march ix: i see 3 dots arranged as a triangle. 3 quarks composing a proton traveling in the large hadron collider waiting to escape the loop. the 3 dots on my right hand are itching.
(almost unreadable)...paradise was an exclusion zone guarded by the archangels of the russian military, an alienated void inhabited by animals, angels and power plants. atom and geneve had left the zone. their fall-out sealed the zone forever. the forgotten apple started to rot. inside the rotting apple rested the core. still remaining in the garden: the forgotten tree, the tree of life: the tree of half-life: the nuclear treenity. between carbon and contamination. between fossil and infossil. interface between future and past. carrier of light replacing cultural compilation with cultural contamination. form fails to fragmentation, contamination contributes to culture. light never wormed, compressor of worlds, forbidden bit, forbitten bid. radiant fruit. o omnipresent, root of the treenity, we salute you...
august, year x: the forest fires of russia have reached the zone of chernobyl. nuclear trees are burning. radioactive particles are dancing again. cassandra. welcome light! let us bring the fire back. why is desaster always eating the poor?
september, year x: the html-universe of the social-machine in it's today form was born at cern by a request of the neverending mother-machine. 10 years ago, i started to calculate the cost of energy for this final and precious database. i finished the effort and found the price <tag>, the only information on the internet impossible to find. stone by stone i constructed a colossal black pyramid of coal and placed it in cairo next to it's parental pyramids of giza. i lay down the first stone in berlin. a cube with a weight of 30 tons. a personal contribution to the 13th cycle. and we all know that 131313 / 13 / 13 equals 777. well, don't we?
january, year xi: father has built the house. we can leave the cave. cairo is burning. it is a revolution out of the blue. they say that the role of the internet in this process can not be overestimated. nofretete notre-fête. embodied now, handing over the anar-key, opening locks that would never explode. without the social tran-sister-machine there would be no revolution. in the shadow of the black pyramid rested this precious surprise.
PEACE IS NOW
1. we have mutated from collective, connective to corrective. let us correct you, before it is too late!
2. art is only good for entertaining the troops in times of crisis
3. in times of peace, artists behave in affirmative manners
4. artists are the weakest tribe, fighting their own shadows
5. media art has the palest face of all
6. digital art has only been understood by its chinese inventors and possibly by binary mr. leibniz
7. computers need so much energy for production and operation, that glaciers will melt
8. software is a blindborn virus
9. email is a lame timebomb
10. all hardware is sin and will rot
11. the internet spams so much fossil energy, that the sahara will reach your garden very soon
12. dot means tod
13. digital means finger. you have 10 to operate 2 hands. do something now
14. media gives the deepest kisses. save your children. media kissing is soulsucking deep!
15. media is the antichrist. don't believe a word, the word is a whore
16. unplug now and reverse the stream
17. you are not a nomad, just because you are sent all over the globe with a laptop and a mobile phone. nomads don't die at home.
take your animals, children and grandparents along
18. enter life
19. trespass terror
20. trespass terra
21. terra arret
(eng)
by Marko Košnik 2010
"Art is the Signature of a Species"
Michael Saup’s work focuses on the underlying forces of nature and society; an ongoing research project into what he calls the “Archaeology of Future”. His research focus in recent years has been on investigating society’s need and thirst for energy.
Michael Saup was born in March 1961 in Hechingen, Germany. He is a recognized visual artist, filmmaker and musician. During the 1990s he developed a reputation as one of the foremost protagonists of digital art. His work, often in cooperation with other artists, has been shown widely in exhibitions, festivals and on stages around the world. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Michael Saup studied music, computer science and visual communication at the Dominican University of California, San Rafael, USA, the University of Computer Science in Furtwangen and the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design in Germany.
In 1980, while enrolled at the Dominican University, Michael Saup studied music and computer science and started to combine both fields with an algorithmic approach. In 1987, he created “Flicker”, his first computer-generated light installation, which immersed a gallery space with permutations of pulsing light. From 1989 onwards, Saup began to experiment with real time transformations of sound and image, helping pioneer the development of software as an artform.
Michael Saup’s early work pioneered direct control of digital film through music and sound-driven interactive computer animations, ground breaking work which he applied to installations, concerts and ballet. With these innovations he created installations like “Pulse8” (1992), concerts like “Hyena Days” (1992) and “Binary Ballistic Ballet” (1995).
In 1992 he founded the group ”supreme particles”, helping launch the field of audiovisual processing and interactive environments. This group specialised in the creation of experimental software in connection with art, architecture and music. A work of this group was “Light as Skin” (1997-2007), a connecting passenger transit tunnel bathed in light at Frankfurt International Airport being one of the first large scale and long term interactive works of media art in public space.
Their installation “R111” (1999-2001) exhibited the concept of virtual matter and its ramifications in the real world. While new media actual tendencies were virtualizing reality, R111 took the inverse approach of materializing virtuality: choreographing particles of matter as though they were pixels.
The turn of the century saw Michael Saup begin to focus on political and social issues, such as access to communications media, consumption and transformation of fossil and “infossil” resources, nuclear history, financial theory and its application to mankind’s day to day existence. During a 3 year retreat with Julia Herzog in a forest, he developed a model which predicted the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past 111 years.
As part of their 'Weapons of Mass Education' project, they initiated workshops with young filmmakers in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Morocco and Afghanistan.
Research and Teaching
Michael Saup has held appointments at several universities, including the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and the Zürich University of the Arts. From 1991 to 1994 he was artistic and scientific assistant at the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt. In 1999 he was appointed as founding professor for Digital Art at HfG Academy of Art and Design in Karlsruhe, where he remained in residence through 2005.
Press
“Sometimes, it felt like the inner workings of the universe made visible. It revolved slowly, then grew in complexity until it seemed, in substance if not style, like a collaboration between da Vinci, Picasso and Stephen Hawking.”
Evening Post, Auckland, New Zealand
“...a merciless revealer using the means of Art.”
Berliner Zeitung
links:
http://1001suns.com/
