[spectre] Banz&Bowinkel: Featured Artists - Archive of Digital Art (ADA)

[Oliver Grau]

New Artist Feature on the Archive of Digital Art (ADA)
BANZ & BOWINKEL  

A visionary world of the (virtual) mind
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/index.php?id=191 

"Ideally by using these technologies, art should see through them and
unveil this imperative role in our society. When it is aesthetically
pleasing, the truth doesn’t hurt so much.
Banz&Bowinkel 

Banz&Bowinkel’s artworks were exhibited in galleries, museums and
festivals around the world (HeK Basel, KM – Halle für Kunst &
Medien,
Graz, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen), and they received residencies
at
Tong Xian Art Center, Beijing, and Artist Residency Herzliya, Israel
among others. In 2017, they received the Digital Sculpture Award from
the Institute of digital art, HfK+G Ulm.
Since 2017, the artist duo lives in Berlin as free-lancing artists.

There is a deep ambivalence in the work of Banz&Bowinkel. The
commonalities/differences of real and virtual spaces lie at the heart
of
their artworks, and the opportunities/challenges of human societies in
the digital age are questioned.

The German artist duo investigates the unknown parameters of digital
technologies that define our lives through communication, consumerism,
and simulated realities. They analyse the performativity in digital
imagery, and the human traces in the mathematical logic of the digital
realm.
In their work, the virtual world is not understood as a simulated
reality, but as a computational counterpart to our perception thereof.
The computer re-structures seemingly hidden the order of physical
reality. Their artworks represent semi-virtual environments in which
almost everything is pre-calculated and executed by computers.
Physical
reality and virtual space merge unconsciously: How does this change
our
understanding of embodiment, nature and our social surroundings?
In their VR work “Palo Alto” (2017), the very own virtual landscape
and
avatars represent their computational origin. The fear of the unknown
meets the fascination of a 3D-environment waiting to be explored.

MEDIAARTHISTORIES: Virtual Reality, Avantgarde, and the perception of
reality
Banz&Bowinkel studied painting at the fine-arts academy in Düsseldorf,
a
renowned art school where artists such as Gerhard Richter, Joseph
Beuys
and Sigmar Polke graduated. They re-conceptualize ideas and issues in
modern art for contemporary digital art, such as self-reflection,
materiality, and media. The clean, geographic aesthetics of their work
responds to its virtuality, and is reminiscent of Minimal Art as well
as
the photographic realism in surrealist paintings. In their first
digital
art series "body paintings" (2016-2019), the tradition of gestural
abstraction was connected to action painting. Recordings of body
movements in space are coupled with fluid simulations. With an
Augmented
Reality App, viewers can scan the paintings in the exhibition to
detect
the virtual layers behind it.

Reminiscent of the geographic and sculptural shapes in the
(pre)surrealist paintings of Chirico, Banz&Bowinkel’s imagery is as
disquieting as visionary when it portrays the virtual worlds behind
our
physical reality. In their work ”Mercury”(2016), elements of
nature,
culture or technology intertwine into a surreal terrain in which known
physical laws are overridden. The animation follows the parameters of
its material, its software and hardware. The virtual landscapes
confront
us with the strangeness of known objects in new, virtual environments.

QUOTES
In their work, the artists focus on the human fascination with
development, permeation and visualization of so-called reality.
Curatorial statement, House of electronic Arts, Basel

Giulia Bowinkel & Friedemann Banz continuously suggest declinations of
virtual and real spaces. Dimensions, consistency and matter are
transformative in their artistic works, they overlap and flow into
their
pictures, videos and installation, coming together as autonomous
parameters.
Christina Irrgang

Check out Banz&Bowinkel’s ADA from their VR installations,
installation photos and much more:
https://www.digitalartarchive.at/database/artists/general/artist/banzbowinkel.html



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ARTISTS represented, among many others: Rebecca ALLEN, Suzanne ANKER,
Cory ARCANGEL, Roy ASCOTT, Louis BEC, Maurice BENAYOUN, Paolo CIRIO,
Charlotte DAVIES, FLEISCHMANN & STRAUSS, Masaki FUJIHATA, Ken
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ADA TEAM:
Oliver GRAU, Nicole High-Steskal, Janina HOTH, Wendy COONES,
Ann-Christin RENN, Viola
RÜHSE, (Editorial Team)
digitalart.editor at donau-uni.ac.at