WATER LIGHT FESTIVAL Kloster Neustift | INSTAGRAM | YOUNG MASTERS talking about their artworks
The BRIXEN WATER LIGHT FESTIVAL is hosted by BRIXEN CULTUR and produced by BRIXEN TOURISM. The main venue of the festival of light is the old city curated by Werner Zanotti and Nika Perne. The two satellite venues – with artworks on display at daytime – are the Franzensfeste curated by Museion and the Neustift Abbey curated by Bettina Pelz.
How Many Different Things Can A Screen Be? by Martina Stella. Published on 30 May 2023.
ARTBOOK by WATER LIGHT FESTIVAL. Published on 1 June 2023.
The textile sculpture consists of finely gridded textile, loosely laid in some places, and densely layered in others. In the interplay of animated and projected graphics, optical interferences are created. They render visible a variety of degrees of opacities and generate an ethereal aesthetic emerges.
Gudrun Barenbrock selected photo and film footage on over- and underwater imageries from her extensive archive. She collected in order to collage, animate, and offset it with traces of technical devices to reproduce visual digital material.
Just as the interplay of light refraction, diffraction, and reflection in nature creates a rainbow, Nazanin Fakoor generates optical interference with projections on mirror films. The moving screens display color-intensive video animations and generate colored reflections that meander through the space.
The video essay is an envelope of artistic research on vision, encompassing the natural relationship of two eyes, pupil dilation, and constriction according to light intensity, the reflectiveness of the cornea, sensitivity of vision, and natural reflexes resulting in blinking.
Natural networks and energy systems are the visual material of the artists for TENTAKULUM. Their raw material includes micro- and macroscopic images of flora and fauna and artistic drawings and graphics. They become part of an associative flow of images about ecological habitats and address humanity’s accountability to nature.
In Russian “debri” means impenetrable, dense forests, and is used metaphorically for complex and unexplored things. The interactive installation visualizes the problem of cosmic pollution. The visitor walking across the projection field will attract useless space objects along his path.
Ken Matsubara collected Chinoiserie bowls as containers for digital animations. On view are digital animations of black-and-white photographs of selected objects that break in endless repetitions, disappear into the darkness, and reappear on the surface.
For the site-specific intervention FLOW, Angelika Hoeger translates natural shaping processing as in crystalline, liquid, and gaseous states of water into artistic constructions made of straws of paper and plastic. With a multitude of modules, she forms a kind of fluid mesh that extends from the entrance hall to the second floor.
Inspired by the idea that all matter is formed by particles, this project brings to life through the fusion of art and technology. Visitors exploring the responsive system can experience the link between sound, movement, and visual expression.
The artist refers to authoritarianism as a phenomenon responding to democratic failure, social polarization, economic stagnation, and international instability. Assisted by AI, he collected and sequenced visual documentation of authoritarian control systems. The image series change their state of visibility or vagueness depending on the interaction of the audience.
From the Zumtobel Collection, the artwork „Muhammad Ali“ from 2008 by Benjamin Bergmann was on display in the Engelsburg.
From the Zumtobel Collection, the luminous object featuring the slogan „We are the people“ of socio-cultural protest movements in the United States from 2003 by Sam Durant was shown in one of the cells of the Engelsburg.
Bon Kim built an installation that allows the audience to generate electricity with their body heat. She uses a thermoelectric effect to convert temperature differences to an electric voltage. While sitting on the manipulated chair, electricity starts to flow and feed a halogen lamp that provides light for the eco habitat of a tree root.
What looks like an old-fashion radio, is an artistic tool to tune into the past of a space. Via the prototype, visitors can control the time span to go back in time and the room will be filled with audiovisual traces from the recent past.
Cинтон (en: SYNTHON) is a contemporary interpretation to create soundscapes based on compositions of geometric figures. The soundtracks are scanned by a light-sensitive setup reading the graphical notation, and the photocurrent follows all changes in light intensity.
The work consists of a rotating glass disc, partly filled with small glass spheres, illuminated by two led-based light sources. In the interaction of the rotating disc and the small glass spheres following the movement, the blue light travels through the transparent materials in various ways.
In this installation, content in the form of text is introduced to a system that visualizes digital transformation processing instead of visual representation of the content. The title refers to the text material used that talks about the pineal gland, which is a tiny organ in the center of the brain.
The transdisciplinary collective Xenorama works on the interplay of light, light-responsive materials and data. The hybrid LUMONIUS OBJECT is a hommage to the cube, the lense, and the prisma as key elements in the evolution of digital screens.
Youngji Cho collected footage of circular forms and structures from her daily life and random internet sources and used them as the raw material for a digitally animated collage to be projected onto a rotating textile screen.
FLORA is a digital graphic instrument that draws plant-like shapes. Visitors are invited to experiment with it. The animation in FLORA is spawned by superimposed sine waves moving through a series of lines. Philipp Artus has coded it into an algorithmic system that implements the visitor’s instructions in real-time.
THE SYNCRETIC PARADOX is an archive of descriptions of artificial divine beings. It has been generated by an AI system fed with descriptions of deities from all over the world. The audience is invited to research the archive.
The installation consists of three video works showing a water-related movement: Sea water reaching a shore, clear water moving in a glass, and sand running through a hand as a gesture that happens often while being on a beach. They refer to biographical memories of the artist and are designed as infinite loops.
From the Zumtobel Collection, the deconstructed circle titled „Lamentable“ from 2005 by Francois Morellet was on display in the Engelsburg.
From the Zumtobel Collection, the luminous object featuring the slogan „No lie can live forever“ of socio-cultural protest movements in the United States from 2003 by Sam Durant was shown in one of the cells of the Engelsburg.
BRIXEN CULTUR Project Coordination: Matthias Mair
Artists‘ Coordination: Sarah-Lea Langner
Mediatechnics: Lang Medientechnik
Local Technics: Armin Ladinser
Inhouse Technics: Martin Moosburger
FEATURED IMAGE
Groll Berndt Seltmann: Tentakulum (Kloster Neustift 2023)
Photo: Jennifer Braun.