New Artist Feature on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)
BANZ & BOWINKEL
A visionary world of the (virtual) mind
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/index.php?id=191
Ideally by using these technologies, art should see through them and unveil this imperative role in our society. When it is aesthetically pleasing, the truth doesn’t hurt so much.
Banz&Bowinkel [1]
Banz&Bowinkel’s artworks were exhibited in galleries, museums and festivals around the world (HeK Basel, KM – Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen), and they received residencies at Tong Xian Art Center, Beijing, and Artist Residency Herzliya, Israel among others. In 2017, they received the Digital Sculpture Award from the Institute of digital art, HfK+G Ulm.
Since 2017, the artist duo lives in Berlin as free-lancing artists.
There is a deep ambivalence in the work of Banz&Bowinkel. The commonalities/differences of real and virtual spaces lie at the heart of their artworks, and the opportunities/challenges of human societies in the digital age are questioned.
The German artist duo investigates the unknown parameters of digital technologies that define our lives through communication, consumerism, and simulated realities. They analyse the performativity in digital imagery, and the human traces in the mathematical logic of the digital realm.
In their work, the virtual world is not understood as a simulated reality, but as a computational counterpart to our perception thereof. The computer re-structures seemingly hidden the order of physical reality. Their artworks represent semi-virtual environments in which almost everything is pre-calculated and executed by computers. Physical reality and virtual space merge unconsciously: How does this change our understanding of embodiment, nature and our social surroundings?
In their VR work “Palo Alto” (2017), the very own virtual landscape and avatars represent their computational origin. The fear of the unknown meets the fascination of a 3D-environment waiting to be explored.
MEDIAARTHISTORIES: Virtual Reality, Avantgarde, and the perception of reality
Banz&Bowinkel studied painting at the fine-arts academy in Düsseldorf, a renowned art school where artists such as Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polke graduated. They re-conceptualize ideas and issues in modern art for contemporary digital art, such as self-reflection, materiality, and media. The clean, geographic aesthetics of their work responds to its virtuality, and is reminiscent of Minimal Art as well as the photographic realism in surrealist paintings. In their first digital art series "body paintings" (2016-2019), the tradition of gestural abstraction was connected to action painting. Recordings of body movements in space are coupled with fluid simulations. With an Augmented Reality App, viewers can scan the paintings in the exhibition to detect the virtual layers behind it.
Reminiscent of the geographic and sculptural shapes in the (pre)surrealist paintings of Chirico, Banz&Bowinkel’s imagery is as disquieting as visionary when it portrays the virtual worlds behind our physical reality. In their work ”Mercury”(2016), elements of nature, culture or technology intertwine into a surreal terrain in which known physical laws are overridden. The animation follows the parameters of its material, its software and hardware. The virtual landscapes confront us with the strangeness of known objects in new, virtual environments.
QUOTES
In their work, the artists focus on the human fascination with development, permeation and visualization of so-called reality.
Curatorial statement, House of electronic Arts, Basel
Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz continuously suggest declinations of virtual and real spaces. Dimensions, consistency and matter are transformative in their artistic works, they overlap and flow into their pictures, videos and installation, coming together as autonomous parameters.
Christina Irrgang
Check out Banz&Bowinkel’s ADA feature, interview and profile with videos from their VR installations, installation photos and much more:
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/banzbowinkel.html
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Since its foundation in 1999, the ARCHIVE OF DIGITAL ART (former Database of Virtual Art) has grown to be the most important online archive for digital art. In cooperation with established media artists, researchers and institutions it has been documenting the rapidly evolving world of digital art and its related fields for more than a decade and contains today a selection of thousands of artworks at the intersection of art, science and technology. ARTISTS and SCHOLARS are invited to join the community and set up their own archive pages.
ARTISTS represented, among many others: Rebecca ALLEN, Suzanne ANKER, Cory ARCANGEL, Roy ASCOTT, Louis BEC, Maurice BENAYOUN, Paolo CIRIO, Charlotte DAVIES, FLEISCHMANN & STRAUSS, Masaki FUJIHATA, Ken GOLDBERG, Agnes HEGEDÜS, Lynn HERSHMAN LEESON, Ryoji IKEDA, Eduardo KAC, Ken RINALDO, KNOWBOTIC RESEARCH, Lev MANOVICH, George LEGRADY, Golan LEVIN, Rafael LOZANO-HEMMER, Joseph NECHVATAL, Michael NAIMARK, David ROKEBY, Jeffrey SHAW, Julius v. BISMARCK, Paul SERMON, Karl SIMS, SOMMERER & MIGNONNEAU, STANZA, Nicole STENGER, THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD, Peter WEIBEL, et al.
Advisory board: Christiane PAUL, Roy ASCOTT, Erkki HUHTAMO, Gunalan NADARAJAN, et. al.
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Due to the processual, ephemeral, interactive, technology-based and fundamentally context-dependent character of digital art, it is at risk for becoming extinct without an adequate documentation. Therefore, the ADA is based on an expanded concept of documentation, which takes account of the specific conditions of digital art.
ADA TEAM:
Oliver GRAU
Nicole High-Steskal, Janina HOTH, Wendy COONES, Ann-Christin RENN, Viola RÜHSE, (Editorial Team)
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[1] Interview with Berlin Art Link: http://www.berlinartlink.com/2017/02/07/virtual-reality-the-unframed-world-an-interview-with-banz-bowinkel/