Kategorie: Installation

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GeOrgel

For actual information, pleaase, visit the GeOrgel-project-website (blog in german / choose your language in the menu)

GeOrgel, interactive installation, Gelsenkirchen 2022-23

„GeOrgel“ is an installation with ten interactive sound drawers. The drawer serves to control the volume of the sound coming from it. The combination of different furnitures becomes a polyphonic instrument and a container for oral history. The installation refers as well to living room culture of the 1980’s as to the surrounding. People from the neighborhood were interviewed and asked if they can contribute a song to the installation. Visitors are allowed to open every case and can also contribute to the drawer’s contents. Furthermore, musicians and artists are invited to perform there. In 2023 „UpcycleTheStreet!“, a series of public interventions takes place in front of the GeOrgel.

The word „GeOrgel“ means something like someone playing an organ badly – but in slang, it refers also to the (failing!) starting of the car engine. The style of the furniture is „Oak rustic“ but it’s also kind of an unofficial follower of the „Gelsenkirchen baroque“. As such, it refers to the city as the location where it’s built and presented. Allthough situated in the west, it’s nowadays Germany’s poorest city according to people’s income situation.

Inside GeOrgel … documentation, 3 mins, 2023
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Maststall

by Stefan Demming in collaboration with Harko Wubs: 3 video installation as a double projection, 1 monitor, 1 screen 80x100cm, seating furniture; 4K / HD, stereo, 12.23“ (Loop), 2022

Pig Prother – installation
double projection (still)
double projection (still)
Pig Prother – installation

As part of a German-Dutch art project, Stefan Demming and Harko Wubs realized a video project as a kind of experimental setup with live pigs. This should enable to see the pig as an individual being. By inviting 5 pigs into a human living room and filming them we can clearly see them being alive. While the resulting short film „Pig Brother“ (9′, 2022) is conceived as a narrative and fictional and, based on the reality show, ironically suggests the rescue of one of the pigs by the viewer’s favor, the video installation „Pig Prother“ invites you to watch how the pigs act in the living room. The synchronized double projection shows the set and the actors in life size. The original painting of a landscape with fattening stables from the set hangs in the appropriate position on the wall. Visitors can take a seat on the living room furniture in the room and also view the pigs in close-up on a monitor, which were taken with various Go-Pro cameras during the shoot. The five pigs were among the few of the country’s 24 million pigs that were allowed to spend part of their short lives outdoors. In front of the cameras, their curiosity proves that they are intelligent animals.

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„Saligia-Superbia“ (PRIDE), Kloster Bentlage, Rheine

As an allusion to the seven deadly sins, 7 trailers with a small hut on it are sent on a journey to 7 places for 2 years. I designed the sin of PRIDE within this mobile exhibition as a somehow „cool-non-communicative“ vehicle that reveals some deeper insights on the second view …

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Ich-Orgel (I-Organ)

in collaboration with / in Zusammenarbeit mit Michael Rieken

(deutsche Version unten)

„Ich-Orgel“ (I-Organ) is a reactive sound and light installation as well as a tool for an an audiovisual performance. It creates electronic interpretations of organ samples by J.S. Bach. When a visitor activates the composition of 6 different tracks / speakers, he can navigate from one channel to another by moving his head slowly to one of the coloured circles that symbolize the sound layers. In addition, the body moments are adding up to a timebased portrait of the player that’s expressed in the 6×7-pixel-display expressed by 42 globe light bulbs.  Watch a documentation of the av performance i organ – video.

„Ich-Orgel“ – Einladung zum meditativen Komponieren

„Ich-Orgel“ von Stefan Demming und Michael Rieken ist eine interaktive Klang-Licht-Installation, bei der Kameraaufnahmen von Besuchern in eine klangliche Komposition und skulpturale Lichtinstallation übertragen werden.

Indem Ausstellungsbesucher einem Feld aus Glühbirnen gegenübertreten, hauchen sie diesem durch ihre Anwesenheit Leben ein. Die Bewegungen haben dabei Einfluss auf eine Komposition aus Klängen, die Orgelwerken von J. S. Bach entstammen.

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SEASAW CHAMBER (Schaukelkammer)

The seesaw chamber – scenarios of the sea (original title: Schaukelkammer)
mixed media installation, 2011
mixed media, 6 channel audio, light controllers, 1 video projection, 1 computer with custom software, 1 video loop on a monitor.
DOWNLOAD CATALOGUE „Szenarien der Meere“ (deutsch/german only)

The seesaw chamber combines cinematic orchestrations and arranges it in rhythmic structures that correspond to different events in the space.
Depending on the film footage the mood of the soundtrack is changing and by this evoking cliché-like topics of old seafare movies where it comes from. Simultaneously to actions in the projected images, the space is animated: a winch is driven and makes sounds, air is blown under a fabric so that it looks like waves, a bell is rung before the storm, an accordion plays a long tone after the drowning. The telescope-object shows filmic telescope views and puts their meaning in a new context.
The elements are composed according to musical and narrative principles in this choreography of audiovisual events.

Text: Johannes Ismaiel-Wendt, Stefan Demmings Schaukelkammer – Szenarien der Meere (german only)

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jungle camp

12-channel-audio, double video projection, 6 blowers, inflatables, textile materials, lights, fog machine, light controlers; custom software, duration: 13’13“

„Jungle Camp“ is a sculptural media landscape of textiles and synthetics hosted in a building from the former textile industry.
This „instant-jungle” evolves and devolves as a technical biotope, performing the reappropriation of an industrial space by nature. The artificial landscape changes by changing light settings and the movements of inflatables. Sounds of growing, vivid flora and fauna create a polyphonic soundscape.

site-specific  installation at the LWL-industrial museum Spinnerei / TextilWerk Bocholt, 2012

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Camping Ensemble

12 tents, 12 lamps, 12-channel-audio, lightcontrolers, 1 computer, custom software, dimensions variable, at least 500 x 600 x 100 cm, 2009

Camping Ensemble is a sculptural light- and soundinstallation that turns moving images like films into a generative composition. A movie is downscaled to 12 pixels on a computer. Twelve tents contain each a lamp that represents the changing lightness of each part of the movie. Parallel to the light, a sine tone in every tent is played in changing intensities. As the sine tones are in a row of connected frequencies, a (more or less) harmonic, polyphonic composition evolves and the installation becomes a kind of an abstract organ.

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town musicians (Stattmusikanten)

interactive / generative videoinstallation 2001 / 2016

Donkey, cat, dog and cockerel are the 4  audiovisual tracks of a composition that’s generated in realtime. Due to an occasional change of the speed of each player’s performance, sound and velocity of the players are constantly changing. According to the fairy tale of the Bremen town musicians, the animals occupied the house of bandits who couldn’t bear the cacophony of the musician’s first performance.

1 computer, 1 camera, 1 video projector, 1 screen, 2 channels audio, custom software, technical support: Michael Hille Rieken; 2001 & as a generative version, 2016

 

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woman on the floor

videosculpture: 1 paper box, 1 monitor, 1 player, clothes; actress: Sarah Hillebrecht, 2001


In an urban public space a passer-by is confronted with a video sculpture that looks like a woman creeping into a paper box. She reemerges, her body covered in brown fur while her face appears in a hole in the front of the box. Behind the screen she is looking peacefully into her inner self, singing and humming an old lovesong in Low-German.

(Won the OLB-media-award on the EMAF-festival 2002)