Homo digitalis will never be full

Computer art exhibition "the world of jtwine.com" by Jurgen Trautwein at the Civic Center Bretten, Germany

The biographer and writer on art Karel van Mander wrote, that Pieter Breugel, the great Dutch landscape painter, when crossing the Alps sucked up the impressions of the mountains on his journey to Italy and literally spit them out, when he returned from his trip.
It is similar with Jurgen Trautweins computer art, only that he doesn't suck up alpine landscapes, but various contemporary issues. He absorbs themes like depersonalization, ecological collapse, obsessions with beauty and violence, to spit them out again, after being digitally manipulated, in a socially critical and ironic manner.
The exhibition is an experimental approach to project the net art site " jtwine.com" into real space. A core subject of this website is the questioning of parallel perception within acoustic and visual media, which culminate in Trautweins work in an overflow, an over stimulation of the senses. His projections consist of scanned and animated drawings, figurative and abstract, which overlap each other till they finally dissolve in a flicker. They are combined with various noises, which also overlap, and noise as a disruptive factor get to be absurd.
Furthermore are in Trautweins website interactive elements integrated, where the visitor can interact with the images, changing the picture plain in endless combination possibilities. Art becomes a game and the visitor himself an artist.
In his project "NIESATT" the visitor has, after each mouse click, constantly to redefine himself. The internet is for Trautwein a resource to cite, copy and to make new compositions. His projects are executed in collaboration with his wife Silvia Nonnenmacher, who takes care of all the technical aspects.
Trautwein calls his art manieristic, to be able to consciously provoke. Nevertheless he doesn't want to give advice to people, rather to shake them up.
The dialog and their opinion about the subjects in his art is important to him.
So he handed out questionnaires in schools of Bretten, where he asks the students about their views of the world and their suggestions of improvement.
Over 300 of the questionnaires where returned to be included in the exhibition as window and floor installation ''What do you think?''.
The show consists of computer art, multimedia projections, paintings, sketches, and questionnaires, a challenging mix of classical and contemporary art forms.

Claudia Schuler, April 2005 published in BNN, translated by j7s

 

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