In Dialogue with Humanity
In a world that is changing frantically, where political, social, and technological currents are constantly challenging the foundations of our society, I see my artistic work as a dialogue with humanity. My focus is on humanness in all its facets, from the quiet moments of contemplation to the loud cries for change – but even more so in our emotions, our vulnerability, our apparent insufficiency, and our irrational dualism we live with on so many levels.
I often wonder: What does it mean to be a human being yesterday, today, or even tomorrow? How can we imagine a world where humans, the individual, society, indeed humanity itself, have a place? And to what extent does the world around us differ from the world we shape through our subjective actions?
“What’s Human”
I collect my artistic works under the tab “What’s Human?” – perhaps also because I never have an answer when someone asks me who I am. I am fascinated by people and our “being alive” (others explore being dead already), both in an expressionistic-philosophical sense and in a biological, driven, limited, and sensual perspective. From Klaus Kinski’s madness, which is actually what life is about, to our compulsion to replicate ourselves in flesh and blood, in memes, golems, and algorithms.
My minds’s eye has been guided in this direction and is inspired by many thinkers, artists, writers, filmmakers, and the increasingly ephemeral contemporary questions we face as individuals and as a society.
Photographic Work
I observe and explore, in an interdisciplinary way, how individuals and communities are interconnected through the fabric of time, actions, and words, similar to a neural network. And the solid I dissolves like smoke so easily and becomes something new. When I use my camera, I like to photograph people in a way that makes them tangible, connectable, and recognisable – we are they, and they are us. I try to maintain enough distance not to intimidate, but I want to be close enough to allow intimacy. I base my capturing on consent because I want to record a glimpse of what makes up lives, more reality than dreams. While I strive to lose distance in seeing, I want us to respect and acknowledge every human in their current space and identity.
Perhaps it nudges us to recognise the fact that we influence the subject of observation through the observation itself, or even create it through this process it the first place.
“Interstices”
Another designation for my work could be the term “interstices”, as I focus my thinking on the changing dynamics between human and technology, society, and time. Something new is emerging – a multidimensional space.
In an era of artificial materials, intelligence, and perhaps soon life forms, and the exponential genesis of information, not only is being human being redefined. Here I ask how these developments affect our identity, ethics, and relationships and what responsibility we have as a society, as constituent beings.
And I often wonder: Do we and can we respond to responsibility at all? Ever? And after the fact, in which pit of the void do the scattered identities end up lying after all the rolling? Above all, I wonder whether I (soon) only exist in these interstices, as a link, as a filler material, as a consumer and supplier of a quantized non-privacy existence. Wouldn’t George Orwell have dismissed our present already as too fantastical?
Humanism in Dissolution and Rediscovery
I believe in the human, but I do not believe in the human we believe in. We are more human than we pretend. Our urge to „change-lie“ (to) the world and ourselves {Hilde Domin} stems from a deeply rooted and effective fear of inadequacy and the end – and causes both.
By seeing, the new already arises – the never insufficient, because unknown. Only our access, our connecting and linking, limits its being. So do we need the dislocation, the dissolution of boundaries perceived in every era to escape the revolution {Hannah Arendt}, that is, the constant repetition? Does freedom and existence emerge through plurality, diversity, through (inter-) subjectivity, and mutation? Then seeing becomes a duty!
Kaleidoscope as Language
In my working as an artist and information scientist, I have experienced myself through the multilayered twists and turns of art, technology, politics, and philosophy. What I do is thus an echo and synthesis of these experiences; an endeavor to capture the human in many facets, even though we will never transcend beyond imaginary snapshots.
What particularly moves me is that art can be a creationist communication between the real and the subjective, the expression, and the impression. Through my photographs, I want to capture the complexity of being-thrown-into-the-world and silently, ever so gently tattoo into the observer’s soul that this world, with its seemingly autonomous entities, is a multiplication machine of his thoughts, and that he himself is an entangled, formative copy of everything.
In the end, I probably just love humans and every one of their stories.