ROBERT SEIDEL (DE)
Weven
LOCATION: PRINSENTUIN
The project Weven is a new environmental video installation by Berlin-based artist Robert Seidel and a successor of his experimental artistic research for the large-scale installation Tempest (USA 2017, documentation: http://vimeo.com/robertseidel/tempest). The artwork Weven combines abstract video projections and immersive soundscapes with choreographed artificial fog and water fountains. It invites spectators to experience the awe of nature, yet also senses of loss of control in the anthropocene’s forceful reshaping of earth.
While a lot of these developments are unpredictable and only slowly becoming part of world-wide political discourse, the artwork focuses on the restaging of the almost forgotten and over-seen sublime. It highlights the ever-changing possibilities of an unfiltered physical world through the looking glass of contemporary artistic tools. The artificial fog and the natural weather forces of late autumn creates a constantly changing atmosphere for the projection. The experimental video material itself consists of abstract imagery that is explicitly constructed to perform complex colour mixing patterns using various scales of detail which will get scattered through water, fog and vegetation.
Weven explores the idea of speculative geo-engineering melding distinct spatial and temporal scales. A musical composition will further refract the scalar differences, mixing ethereal voices and protruding noises into the stochastic humming of the flora and fauna. Robert Seidel (1977) started studying Biology to eventually switch to the Bauhaus University Weimar to complete his study in Media Design. His projections, installations and experimental films have been exhibited at multiple international festivals as well as galleries and museums, such as the Palais des Beaux-Arts Lille, ZKM Karlsruhe, Art Center Nabi Seou and MOCA Taipei. Seidel has received numerous awards for his work, among which the Honorary Award of the KunstFilmBiennale in Cologne and the Visual Music Award Frankfurt. In his work Seidel is interested in pushing the boundaries of abstracted beauty through cinematographic approaches, as well as ones drawn from science. By the organic interplay of various structural, spatial and temporal concepts, he creates a continuously evolving complexity. Out of this multifaceted perspective emerges a narrative skeleton, through which viewers connects to the artwork on an evolutionary-derived and phylogenetic-fixated symbolic level.