Matrix : Skulptur Projekt Münster, 2017

MATRIX
Of mother, womb, array, environment in which more specialised structures can grow.

Theater Münster
Neubrückenstraße 63
10 Jun - 1 Oct, 2017
Site-specific installation with Electric cable, switches, speakers, monitors, custom electronics.

In 1956, the Stadttheater Munster is the first theatre in Germany to re-open after the war. And while most of the city of Munster was rebuilt as historic replica, an intervention by a group of young architects resulted in a “thunderclap" of bewildering pink mosaic tiles and blue glass wrapped around a fragment of ruin. A singular event in the city’s history, that probably would not happen again.

About 16 years after the gala opening of the theater, with its photographs of crowds looking in through the glass -- an artists group from a different zeitgeist proposed an outdoor “matrix" or dark mother sky of wires, as a symbolic counterpart to the 1200 hard-to-change lightbulbs of the interior “lamp sky” of the main theatre hall. Further, seizing the open ends of Norbert Kricke's “Spacetime Plastic" wire sculpture in the front of the theatre, they extended black wires outward till they hit the neighbour institutions: the Volksbank and Munster Zeitung, while ignoring the churches. They also claimed that the mesh sky was a reintroduction of the 4th wall of theatre, without clarifying further. Except to say that in the future, it could have something to do with our responses to surveillance.

In the mid-1980's, a youth connected the grid with an electric switch to the nearest church, via a hidden music synthesiser. This was followed by other peculiar inventions, such as in the early 1990's when a composer brought photographs, an old song, a film and a live feed from the bank into its own matrix, that could be experienced through the glass and without a ticket.

Uses of the matrix have continued since, and in the Munster Sculpture Project of 2017 you can see several of them together, as survivors and benders of time.

Acknowledgements

Virtual person in the Münstersche Zeitung window: Anna Viehoff
808 Church bells: Sneha Khanwalkar and Mark Fulgado
Screens on the theatre glass:  Micheal Klier, Michael Anderson (film clips),  Leo Strauss (lyrics), Stadtarchiv and StadtTheater (images from the 1956 opening)
Thanks: Britta Peters, Jan Bockholt, Christoph Schäfer

Gallery: Matrix
CAMP After Media Promises

Nam June Paik Art Center Prize

An exhibition of the "contextually rich, environment-shifting media works of CAMP".



Bombay Tilts Down, 2022

13m 14s looped, seven channel environment with music
2022
Filmed by CCTV camera from a single-point location in South-Central Mumbai.

In Cameras Res, 2019

De Appel, Amsterdam

On three screens, a city-symphony filmed by automated CCTV cameras in Amsterdam. The optical and motor capacities of these cameras are pushed to an extreme. Certain human subjects reappear near or far in the images, suggesting a form of reciprocal knowledge or intent, a secret pact between cameras and people.

A Photogenetic Line, 2019

A 100-foot long sequence of photo-cutouts, first shown at the Chennai Photo Biennale, March 2019

Men-At-Work with Boxes in Stereo

20 mins, HD. 2 - channel installation
Cantonese, Mandarin
Filmed in Guangzhou at the Zhuhai International Container Terminal

The Country of the Sea

Single exposure solar cyanotype print on cotton fabric
CAMP with Shunya collective and Clark House Initiative 22 x 5 feet
An image of the sea as its own “country”, with frontier towns at its edges disorients an easy reading of this territory

Descendants, 2014

A three-channel installation from 8mm film From the Clark House family archives, sequenced in a timeline as above. Each screen is a different part of the same 8mm frame, usually a face.

From Gulf to Gulf to Gulf, 2013

Feature-length film by sea between western India, eastern Africa and the Persian gulf. First shown at a purpose built outdoor cinema on the creekside in Sharjah in 2013, where many of the sailors gather. Shown in Documenta 13 in an abridged form, as part of the installation The Boat Modes.

83 mins. Original format(s): HDV, SDV, VHS, Cellphone videos (variable). Stereo audio and in-cameraphone music.

Destuffing Matrix

4 channel HDV, 8 minutes

Swearing-In-Whispers, 2011

A screenplay in Courier 12pt melodramatic format, spanning the first three days of lobbying for cabinet spots, in the wake of the Indian general elections of 2009. The dialogue is entirely from phone taps made by the government. The screenplay slows them down and asks: what kinds of environments and scenes may lie behind them, and how are they connected?

Printed screenplay and IVR-based phone line, audience can type in scene numbers to hear dialogue in the original voices. Also performed as a reading.

All Works