Working also with in medium of photography, Thomas Ruff first exhibited the large-sized photographs of his Night series in 1992 at documenta IX. The deserted night scenes resemble one another: an empty back yard, a canal with a railway bridge made of steel, the illuminated entrance to a house, the tracks in front of a station and so on.

Nacht 1, II, 1992 Leihgabe der Stadt Nuernberg, Erworben 1993 © Thomas Ruff and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2001 Photo: Neues Museum in Nuernberg

All these pictures have a disturbing quality about them. By using an optical infra-red low-level light device which became known through its use in the Gulf War, Ruff stirs memories of the green pictures shown in news reports – not only evoking the military context and the specific historical event, but also the special media dimension particular to this war. But this is not its only level these green large-scale photographs have: They lie beyond the conceptual, both beyond what can be captured photographically but also beyond what natural sight can record. Ruff reflects on the effectiveness and perception of images.

Architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio have worked in many media using the built environment and the visual arts, thus broadening the traditional aspects of architecture. Their last renowned architectural project was the Blur Building, a media pavilion for Swiss Expo 2002. For their first project for the web, entitled Refresh, Diller + Scofidio have taken office webcams as their point of departure, with the intention of examining the role of live video technologies in everyday life. For each of the dozen sites located in the US, Europe and Australia that Diller + Scofidio selected for this project, they have constructed fictional narratives using text and fabricated images. For every site there is a grid of twelve images, one of which is live and refreshes when clicked; the other eleven have been constructed for this project with the aid of hired actors and Photoshop. The images therefore loose their original context, even if this is not obvious at first. They develop a cunning afterlife that ironically plays with the possibilities of surveillance, the possibilities of technical tricks available and the insatiable desire of voyeurism.

Using original police photographs, the young German artists Korpys/Loeffler made their ways into a very special research on the terroristic camouflage technique, displayed in the furniture of conspirative appartments of the german RAF. What on the first glance might look like an apparently trivial scyscraper apartment of the seventies turns out to be a fictitious attempt of giving life back a subversive quality long since lost. The text to their artwork is not be missed, too: A wonderful piece of absurd poetics.

Safe zones, No. 7 (The toilets at Kunstverein Hannover), 1999 © Jonas Dahlberg

Last but not least Jonas Dahlberg’s inventive installation Safe zones, No. 7 (The toilets at ZKM) deserves to be mentioned. He has placed a monitor outside a toilet at the ZKM: the monitor makes people imagine that the toilet space is being monitored by a camera, that anyone who intends to pay it a visit has to resign himself to answering the call of nature in a very public convenience. It is not until the visitor makes up his mind, despite this, to make use of it and steps in, that he realizes what was really being monitored in there: a minutely detailed model of a toilet, placed in the same space, turning this everyday environment into a small, exquisite Chinese box.

This cunning experiment on the panoptic environment, placed outside the actual exhibition halls, gives a good ending point to our visit to this highly interesting lookout on the topic. The exhibition in Karlsruhe will go on until 24th of February, 2002. A catalogue will be published by MIT Press.

CTRL Space Exhibiton
Date: October 13th, 2001 – February 21st, 2002
Place: ZKM | Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medientechnologie
Address: Lorenzstr. 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
Tel: +49 721 8100-0
https://www.zkm.de