FIBER Festival

The digital procedure, introduced in the 1940s, was intended to eliminate not only the noise in the channel but the matter itself. This lecture looks at the origin of the digital and how artists nowadays are trying to reclaim matter and raw material processes. To radically advocate matter and it’s quality we might need a neo-alchemistic thinking that offers hybrids between the discrete and the perpetual.

With a media-archaeological outlook, Ralf Baecker digs within obsolete devices for traces and functions that are still detectable in technologies today. His work seeks to form a hybrid between current digital aesthetics and an historical understanding of materials. As a result, he understands technology not as a tool but rather as an epistemological instrument, in order to pose elemental questions about a world perceived through technological impressions.

Ralf Baecker (1977, DE) is an artist working at the intersection of art, technology and science. Through installations and machines, Baecker explores fundamental mechanisms of action and effects of new media and technologies. In his representations and spatializations of microscopic processes he seeks to expand our perception. At the core of his objects lies the entanglement of the virtual with the actual, or rather, with the world.
Image courtesy of Klaus Wäldele