The Opening of the ZKM Media Museum
a report by Sonya Rapoport

On October 18, 1997 the ZKM (Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe,
Germany) opened the doors of its Media Museum, an electronic counterpart
to the Louvre. The structure, originally conceived architectually as a
glass cube to echo the image of a monitor, was constructed from a
renovated munitions factory. A smaller blue structure in the form of a
cube, containing its music and acoustic facilities, dramatically
dominates the entrance. As early as 1872 the site was used for weapons
manufacture; a new construction, completed in 1918, equipped the German
militia with arms during World War I and then again in World War II.
This architectual monument to the industrial age is now converted to a
stunning electronic Bauhaus with an exhibition space of 130,000 square
feet. Only two other museums, the InterCommunication Center in Tokyo and
the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria are similarly dedicated to
new media art.

Opening night the building sustained its feeling of openness, gracefully
accomodating thousands of people. I navigated easily up and down its
cantilevered staircases, and through a rubric of categories of Media
Bodies, Media Spaces, Media Visions, Media Arts, Media Experiments and
Media Games. The journey seemed logical as I experienced it but in
retrospect a maze of spectacle becomes a schizophrenic Disneyland not
easily sorted out.

From the balcony on the second floor where the Media Museum is located,
Jill Scott had established CU See ME connections with participants in
distant lands. Dialogues focused on the body, its identity and
transformation, a prevalent theme in her interactive installation work
and throughout the ZKM's collection. As well as Scotts' richly
referenced and physically objectified DIGITAL BODY-AUTOMATA were Tony
Oursler's poignant and soleful video projected image /puppet HELLO? and
Bruce Nauman's nervous RAW MATERIAL—BRRR. At ZKM, Nauman's head in his
video installation was shaking larger than life and made more sense here
than my former experiences of viewing it at Documenta and other places.
On the other hand, the large scale of Frank den Oudsten's ten oversized
FLOATING IDENTITIES figure sculptures did not enhance its metaphoric
beauty.

The interactive Web, CU See ME, extended from the above balcony to the
environment on the central main floor below, where trytograms (three
dimensional monitor stations that resembled modernistic free-standing
mailboxes) were installed. Keyboards helped direct you to wherever you
wanted to go, and to what you wanted to see and told you what you wanted
to know about the artworks and their creators. Here a visitor could
also participate in Lynn Hershman's new interactive project, DIFFERENCE
ENGINE, by scanning him or herself into the digital network system to
become an avatar appearing in the networks' simulated space of the
museum.

Peter Weibel's TRAMPLING JUSTICE UNDERFOOT incorporated a floor of
panels bearing the word RECHT (law), that conceptually related to
Karlruhe's role as the city seat of Germany's supreme court. Michael
Bielicky's MENORAH alighted small monitors on each of the seven branches
of his large steel candelabra. On the monitors' screens a video images
of flickering flames from a wood fire emanated hauntingly. Meanwhile a
different brand of fire, Franziska Megert's PLAYING WITH FIRE video
depicted flames enveloping the morphing of male to female and female to
male genital transgender application. Continuing with the theme of the
basic elements (but less provocative in spite of their sensational
scale) were Fabrizio Plessi's LIQUID TIME (water) and Bill Viola's TREE
of KNOWLEDGE (earth related).

My mood changed considerably as I went from piece to piece. I was upset
when I saw an unending line of youngsters waiting to pull the gun's
trigger in Lynn Hershman's work, AMERICA'S FINEST. This camera-gun was
designed to document the horrors perpetrated by weapons. Here it
glowered with misconstrued intentions and bore an American label.

I was grateful for the light hearted minutes I experienced viewing
Stephan von Huene's DANCING ON TABLES which presented half figures of
Presidents Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson and Jesse Jackson configured
from the waist down as tap dancers. Visitors' movements activated these
personalities to spout excerpts from their public speeches as they
danced in a personalized gestural routine.

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This article was originally published in LEONARDO Almanac.