New media theories of the late seventies and the eighties, for example by Friedrich Kittler and Paul Virilio, have not only meticulously or eccentricly traced the integration of mind and media culture in everyday life, but especially treated how military machinery and daily media technology are interwoven. The Rising Star among the waste products oft the Cold War, the Internet, spurred by the development of the computer industry, which in times of the Cold War has perhaps already because of security considerations not been possible, breeded in his first ten years of media art beautiful flowers, which were employed with a preference on security technologies in their aesthetic and theoretical framework. Often as an agent provocateur, but primarily playing with the neighbors in the network, which were still in childhood, caricaturing their clumsy business busy-ness, as in the case of etoy.com, or featuring virtual identities, bad but like their creators would be like. This was noticed in the art-scene especially if the Internet was critized. The Web knows as we know, no federal states, no party cake-sizing, no village behavior control. Of course, you never know exactly who is who in what Webcompany by whom remotely controlled. But well. At the beginning of the nineties, however, the technological military, including the Web, were media of romance, nostalgic relics that you hang like brooches on the welder glasses or on the coloured Fassbinder coat. At that time, Olina Lialina was appointed for a professorship for media art in Stuttgart. Even before her, 1985, Magdalena Jetelova came from Middle Europe with an advanced scholarship in the country's main southern city of Munich, and has there since 2004 a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts. Although she began her work with (monumental) wooden sculptures and installations in factories that show still not quite the technological joy of the early nineties suspect was available, but they realized exactly 1990 in the far north a high technological Land Art project, in which along a geographical chasm was redrawn by laser light through, fitting that in the special region of the chasm almost the whole day was set dark landscape. Other projects are working with satellite technology to communicate in international locations, especially when Jetelova means that you observe and unlimit your views and their space, or at least under questioning borders. Typical for such an impression of narrowing was a pyramid's installation "domestication of a pyramid" in Vienna, where Jetelová built a pyramid in its approximate original size into the art museum around its stairs and walls, on to and under it.
From the 1990s on increasingly intelligible strategies of expansion and a mimesis of observation has arisen: light, laser, satellite, invisible vibrations, waves, particles etc.
The first title in the dozen of pages long list of projects by Jetelova on her web site ( www.jetelova.de), which expresses the "National Security" theme, refers to an exhibition at the art assembly Marburg, 2006. In a much larger framework and almost an ideal environment, the huge, "transparent" and whitehally foundations of the H2's art exhibitions in the glass palace, a factory building with a pretty, almost secret-philical graphic Cabinet, has now Jetelova staged the monumental installation "departure". The technological impetus to the notorious Franz-Josef-g-airport, comes save. The exhibition's name ranks the H2 prettily into the architecture of the luxury hotel Kempinski, whose beautiful marble halls conincide with the airport's nice disco "Night Flight" nearly perfectly. Romance fed up, up to the wonderful captious name of the exhibition venue, for younger age groups prohibited as the night flight. As such, the whole dish of the secret, insinuating, covered and hidden, desires of expansions and scopophilies. They are directed to anything in the venue, a fact that grows slowly into consciousness while visiting the exhibition. The oberserving elements special interest are legs, vehicles of locomotion, which the observing camera again and again laundries and parties. After two minutes, according to the artist, the camera images appear on a video screen in the photographic Cabinet: black and white, strangely touched, the people often flattened, the rooms a little changed to flat abstraction. The images are artificially reduced in light so that the neon lights in the beautiful silvery pipes on the ceiling of the hall deconvolve all their aesthetic effect. The special case and design element straight to the eye is the complete covering with movable mirrows of the hall walls.
These mirrors are not friendly, caculable and rigid how it is known from the cosy halls of ballett, but they are moved by invisible motion detectors on the ceiling, back and forth, to fluctuate such that the mirror image dissolves in waves. The Association of mirror glass and water reflections on the phenomenon is a surface skin that let a slightly abuzz glass of water stay in his state. For glaziers, mirrors have a similar structure, can decompose completely if cut at a point. The technological and almost phobical games with omnipotence wishes and fantasies that are in this small mimesis of the real satellite box of "Services" for Internal Security at Gabling enjoyable in space, even get a kind of organic momentum and move the art recipients thus a little more than pure showing of a "Security has more fun" - program. The movie or film footage found in the Graphical Cabinet is, in addition, such similar and prototypically stylish" like experimental films of the eighties, randomly emerged by the playful pivoting camera, that the question arises, how the evaluation of observation data affects the Gabling staff, whether it is trained in taste and tolerance or just the rejection of art is brought up because they are forced to constant attention to the object of reference with the manner of presentation just a disability. Well, consider that even Sherlock Holmes, also analytical observer, had to learn while working for the Bohemian king, that the presentation may completely change the subject matter and the way of its perception is not independent of the emotional worlds of the beholder, whose willingness to take forms of representation to be possible is not always independent of even unconscious activities of brain cells. Thus, how deep is the small surveillance fair digging, when it takes the people's fantasies of power from them by covering the vibration causes, but as well as pushed the visitors into such fantasies when the walls perceives the visitor's movements as physical inducement to curl and shiver. We trample around in tutti-frutti. The hall looks brightly and enlightened fantastic, of course. It takes it time not to look at the mirrowwaves as aesthetical phenomena but as something in a complete system of observation, to get camera and the little evaluation cinema into the right perspective. Then the issue is no longer beautiful but something between funny and spooky, dark, uncomfortable? Suitable, to cotton on to our own perception of observations in such a sense? Hm...
Report and photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
Exhibition Data: "departure" from Magdalena Jetelova
28th May to 14th September 2008
H2 - CENTRE for Contemporary Art in the Glass Palace
Beim Glaspalast 1
86153 Augsburg
Phone. ++49 (0) 821 / 324 - 4155 or - 4162
Opnening Hours Tue 10 a.m. -20 p.m.
Wed - Sun 10 a.m. - 17 p.m.