The dramatic European transformation processes of the last fifteen years
have been the catalyst for the multimedia and exhibition project the Virtual
Residency of the media artists Monika Bohr, Claudia
Brieske, Leslie Huppert and Gertrud Riethmüller.
The project group is calling on artists world wide to participate
in a virtual ‘’migration’’. The project initiates
a creative transit of images, motives and concepts through the World
Wide Web to real exhibition venues in Europe.
The artistic experiment the Virtual Residency
uses the examination of the states of personal and collective destabilization
as the actual, powerful engine of the migration movements. Hope, fear, dreams,
necessities, distress and the wish and the will for change generate individual
images. They are examples, ‘’samples’’ or patterns
for migration motives. Through the virtual projection screen of the project,
its Internet platform, they receive a direction, they will be made visible
and find a domicile. There, on behalf of their creators, they become virtual
residents.
The project group will then enable a part of the virtual residents to materialize
their ideas and concepts in reality. Based on the ‘’sample character’’
of the concepts that had been submitted to the Virtual
Residency, the group has developed an approach to
realize the ideas as real multimedia installations in various exhibitions
in Europe, so called ‘’model houses’’. One
associates the term ‘’model house’’ with a collective
image of the paradise. It is a pure place, a white place, a vessel, at the
same time a ‘’void’’, a ‘’blank space’’,
a place without it’s own character, without personality. Thus, the ‘’model
house’’ will be the ideal projection screen for migration motives.
Model houses will be created from October 2006 in Germany,
France, Poland and Luxembourg.
With the support of the Zentrum für Kunst und
Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany.
