Ortsbegehung 4–body of the message
Sandra Becker + Blank & Jeron + Daniel Pflumm
curated by Inke Arns
4 July–16 August 1998
Opening: Friday, 3 July 1998, 7 p.m.
http://www.snafu.de/~inke/NBK/body.html

The Neuer Berliner Kunstverein is now showing the fourth exhibition in
the Ortsbegehung ("site inspection") series: an annual presentation of
contemporary positions in new art featuring three representatives from
Berlin. We place each of these projects in the hands of guest curators
in order to guarantee the necessary pluralism of opinion, and do justice
to the varying approaches possible in view of a diverse spectrum of
artistic observation, experience and conclusions. After the first three
"Site Inspections" of the past years, the fourth presentation now
organized by curator Inke Arns is titled "body of the message," and
features installations deploying new electronic media–video, computer,
Internet.

The works to be premiered in the exhibition by Sandra Becker, Daniel
Pflumm and Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron are linked by a common
interest in the radical re-structuring/re-invention of public space
currently in progress. Although invisible to the human eye, the process
has far-reaching implications. The works are concerned with those new
types of media structures that, as nomadic and ephemeral extensions,
graft themselves onto our public spaces, and qualitatively change
them–in a political sense, too. The artists strive to make visible the
unseen motion in these new urban spaces of transit, to visualize
specific streams of signs, merchandise, bodies and information–those
elements, in other words, that are in transit through these new
territories. The term "body of the message" comes from the field of
e-mail communications, where it designates that part of an electronic
message addressed to a human reader as opposed to the program code
directed to the machine.

Becker, Pflumm, and Blank & Jeron choose approaches which scrutinize
various aspects of "message bodies" in contemporary mediatized urban
spaces: the movements by people in these spaces; the fluctuation of
signifying bodies, as well as the increasing digitization (i.e. the
radical reduction) of bodies that, until now analog, are caught up in a
process of transition into the realm of information.

The positions represented in "body of the message" are ones of a
generation of artists that uses new media as part of its "natural"
environment, so to speak, and therefore does not need to explicitly
labour the concept of "media art," in part even rejects this notion.
They work with a minimum of technical expenditure (consumer technology),
and have no need of a large battery of machines–in contrast to the
spectacular works of media art meantime canonized in the museums.

For her work metro scan (4 videos, combined with large format
photographies, 1998) Sandra Becker uses recorded images of passers-by in
the subways of New York, Berlin, Moscow and Tokyo. The "message bodies"
shown to us by Becker are obviously "real": human bodies in motion,
standing on escalators, rushing in their hundreds along subway passages.
Although Sandra Becker is citing in her work the aesthetic of public
surveillance cameras, she immediately subverts the normative distanced
totality of this view by adopting a number of standpoints. It is de
Certeau's metaphorical or migrational city that one encounters in her
works.

In Daniel Pflumm's "minimalist" video (1998) the "message bodies" are
reduced to the glossy veneer of pure surfaces: colourful logos,
corporate identities and brand names frenetically alternate with each
other. These "message bodies" point to supra-individual, multi-national
corporations, geographically distributed enterprises making products
sold worldwide in a globalized economy, and therefore requiring images
that are globally recognizable. These control characters pass through
the urban realm and collective global subconscious, indicating in
passing the velocity of an almost instantaneous world-wide presence. At
the same time, there is something especially fragile and transient about
those logos the artist "censored" or "de-cored"–stripped of all text
and reduced to their minimal graphic form. Daniel Pflumm's videos are
archives recording the rapid transformations in advertising and media
aesthetics.

Scanner++ (12 scanners, computer, video projection, Internet, 1998) by
Joachim Blank & Karl Heinz Jeron is a hybrid project that incorporates
the Internet at the same time as it extends into "real" space by means
of an interactive installation. Via a "walk-on" scanner, "real" bodies
enter the virtual realm, their physical mass becomes information, traces
of bodies; compatible, globally retrievable and archivable
(http://sero.org). The principle of the search engine–actually an
industrious, invisible software program scouring the Internet for
information–is here lent an almost obscenely material form as a
symptomatic object now superimposed over real space, which it proceeds
to systematically scan. Blank & Jeron ironically blur the narrow
precipice separating information from disinformation, and with their
contribution they question the "'true' value of information in our
society."

A bilingual catalogue (German/English) will be published (18 DM, 64 p.,
many illustrations, full colour; with texts by Inke Arns, Ralph Lindner,
Gerrit Gohlke, Thilo Wermke).

We would like to invite you for a press preview of the exhibition, which
will take place at 11 a.m. on the day of the opening (3 July 1998). The
artists and the curator of "body of the message" will be present between
11 a.m. and 1 p.m.