 So, our next speaker is Sarah Joana Torreur. Sarah is a curator and writer focusing on time-based art practices and techno-social entanglements. She is a curator at Hauster Kunst in Munich, where she has been conceiving rich public programs and commissioning performances to artists such as Isabel Lewis and Christelio Yerri and works by Caston Nicolai and Yana Sutela. Together with Andrea Lissoni, she co-curated a retrospective on Fujiko Nakaya and co-edited a comprehensive publication on the artist. Torreur has previously worked at the Ninth Berlin Biennale and Transmediale Berlin and with performance groups like OMSC Social Club and the Agency. So, welcome Sarah. Thank you, hi. Introduction, thank you Bettina for the invitation. Thank you all for being here. I think I sort of want to pick up a few of the thoughts that Karen brought up and also in relation to the question that was posed last. But I'm going to start, I think, with this notion of the sampling. Michel Marieros has often been described as a visual DJ or his methods have been compared to sampling, as Karen you also mentioned that, bringing together fonts and motives from different cultural registers. And I want to highlight, I think, that these cultural techniques, such as sampling and remix, they originate in the Black Atlantic and we should note that, according to the people, I spoke with also in preparation of this presentation that Michel Marieros was not necessarily a raver. But then it's curious that in talking about his work, we come across all of these notions like remixing and sampling. So, yeah, I wondered, I wanted to go into this a little bit and also thinking about how these terms coming from a music background contribute to our understanding of techno culture or cyber culture, that we also find a lot of references in Marieros's work. These notions, like sampling and remixing, they continue still to shape our digital or fidgetle landscapes that we deal with today. So, I found that the rhythm could be an interesting way to look at Marieros' work and try to maybe find some order in what has been described so often as the digital chaos. And I'm starting with this work that we already looked at, which was installed at the Munich main station in 1998. I don't actually know how long it was up for. I just kind of often think of this painting, although I've never seen it, so to me it's really almost like a memory that I've never experienced. And I think it's interesting that this is a public space that I frequent quite regularly and I'm often exhausted and I'm actually wishing for more acceleration or for time to go by much more faster. And this is not an exhibition space, right? So, exhibition spaces often pretend to be timeless spaces. And the train station is a very busy sort of like semi-public space and it's composed of many different rhythms that are unfurling and parallel. There's, for example, the intervals of trains arriving and leaving, there's also the constant delays. There are shops and sounds and smells that only appear in specific times of the day or in specific seasons. There's the clock, which we can also see in that picture. And there's the individual rhythms of people, people's lives, of chance and encounters. And they're all sort of like nested together in a spatial simultaneously and in a coexistence. So, Bichlonegung, it's situated in the background, but it's still quite well visible and I feel like it really underscores these different rhythmic qualities of the space. It's also directly involved in this discontinuous sum of visual contents that we can see, like you see the advertising, the coffee cocoa, and it kind of like works in a similar way as Karen also mentioned the Coca-Cola and the sneaker example earlier on. So it's pierced into that wall, but it's also sort of, it's part of a rhythm that escapes it at the same time, right? And it also has a rhythm in itself, like these buttons appear quite often in his work. They seem to like bend forward towards the viewer, towards the public. And they emphasize a sort of temporal dynamic moment of the perception of this work. And they look a bit like, I don't know, like a bubble. It's about to burst. It also plays on these simple forms that we know from billboards and indicators to like a minimal attention span. And we also see the Carrera race track that like reappears in his work quite often. I'm citing from a book that was given to me by Bastian Grundorfer, who had worked with Michel Mayors in the past or in the last years. It's a book from 1995 and it's totaled localizer 1.0. It was handed to me with the words, this was some sort of Bible for the vibe and all. So I really dig into that book and doesn't actually speak so much about visual arts. In between the many pages dedicated to Hubble Sound and Techno Conscious and Camouflage as a strategy, which is quite interesting. Motion graphics as well. There's one essay on art as contemplated in Berlin by the turn of the millennium. And there's this quote that I'm just going to read. Here we are talking about a new meeting of the aesthetic creation with the public. A meeting that doesn't require the full attention of the onlooker, but rather includes itself in a field of experience to which non-plastic elements like music, nowadays the principal vehicle for a sense of life, the encounter with other persons, the movement, visual elements like light, lasers, etc. have to be included. So if we remember now the buttons of Beschlonigung that allude to somehow like rescaling or setting filter priorities. Yeah, maybe you can read it. There's like a priority and the other one that says like components and like a scale. So this really speaks to a commitment to mediation rather than representation. And I would say this also speaks to mayors embracing working and living in a mediated or fully mediated world. 1998 was still the dawn of mainstream internet, but I think we can see or sense that the images had already started moving. 1998 is the year of Hamster Dance, the world's first meme, if I may say that. And images are really no longer still on the canvas or in the TV and they are not switched on and off at will with the remote control anymore. It's a very different pulse. So again, I'll come back to rhythm. It's reported that since they were first released in 1985, I think Marius walked around with a Sony handicam and he was record and then potentially filter later. And unfortunately we will never know if he would have gotten around to sort out these materials that he had collected. But I think we all know that it's from our own experience that it's often unlikely to ever go back to all those recordings, bookmarks and screenshots simply because there are too many. And we find relatable slogans actually in Marius' work like it doesn't really matter what things look like if one cannot see them that well anyway or not much is thrown away because there are no places to throw it. That's something about from 99 the quotes. So looking at the Carrera race track and alluding to what Karen quoted earlier as like the chaos of the digitalization, the Carrera race track and the Beschlonigung the acceleration, all of this has led to the reading of the data stream as the stimulus vortex this endless loop that sort of unfolds but never really develops. And one year before Marius created Beschlonigung, he held a lecture on Polke and he talked about images and memory which I think is as interesting. I included this quote here. He says, there is never a chance of suppressing the memory of an image. This is generally the case with the past or the ephemeral. The desire for more pictures becomes a flow of moving images. There will be countless images as long as there's a desire for acceleration. Whether it's a new picture or the repetition of the same plays a big role. And that's interesting in general. Both have priority at the same time. So no camera, no image or series of images can show these simultaneous rhythms that he's talking about. The new pictures, the repetition of the same pictures and them having a priority at the same time. Aside from cameras or paintings or what have you, it requires a tent of eyes and ears and a memory and the memory grasps the present as it restores its moments and the movement of these diverse rhythms. I think one does not merely read the images of Marius but also really feels them. And that's something Karen had also mentioned previously, the installation part of it, like how you would walk over the floor that's installed and hear the sound of your footsteps. I think that all plays into the experience of the work. Marius writes in his notes, Techno only works through an abundance of abused bass rhythms. Abundance of serial work can be important again through an ultra-large rhythmic production of 160 by 140 paintings. That's a very specific reference. I don't actually know what it refers to. Things quick, serial and random will be an important trigger for me in the near future. The representational, which is usually surprising in comics, can be replaced by an extreme spectrum of versatility on the level of abstraction. The pictures mustn't appear too rigid. So here we're going back in time and we see again the Carrera Vortex race track enclosing the word advance. We also already see one of these main principles, the reconfiguration of the same elements, what has been described as Techno when looking at Marius's work, the effects of digital working production. And it's not necessarily just music, but this reconfiguration of temporal sequences was perhaps the most obvious in music, I would say. And time and this rhythm of all life can be stored and stretched thanks to the computer. Speed and acceleration, something that can be tempered with. The boxes, and these are actually the titles A1 to 7, T1 to 7, H1 to 7, and M1 to 7 have been compared to Warhol's Burlow boxes, but they're actually the size of the Macbooks that were sold back then. The box is 95 by 55 by 73 centimeters. And in the line of logos next to the Carrera track, we find references to Caval's Leaves of Dave Clark's 1995 release, the Red Three on the label Deconstruction and Richie Hawton's Plastic Man. I think what you can see here is really bad screen shots. I'm sorry. And this might have just been common knowledge but let's forget techno for a moment and look at musical meter, which is so closely tied to computer technologies and how it perhaps can make sense of this pile of boxes. So musical meter involves our initial perception as well as subsequent anticipation of a series of beats that we abstract from the rhythm surface of the music as it unfolds in time. In the rhythm we could think of as timed movement through space. Most music dance but also of course poetry establishes and maintains a sort of metric level, which is a basic unit of time that may be audible or may just be implied. So it's the poles or as well the beat. So we have a basic unit, let's say these boxes and within these boxes we are on the boxes we see these logos, which are again sort of units and they are four versions of these logo sets. So we have like different discrete items that are recombinable at will. And they're all again all these like rhythmic elements they're like nested together and in this case they're accumulated and stacked. So the beat consists of these identical yet distinct periodic short duration stimuli perceived as points in time. And the beat obviously depends on repetition of a pattern that is short enough that we can memorize it. So here for example think of the brand logos as well. And the tempo of the piece is the speed or the frequency and this is measured and how quickly the beat flows. We'll go back to the question of like the quick beat later on. We'll think of beats per minute as the sort of time that we're thinking in. If the beat is too slow you don't really understand the succession anymore and the musical piece would become unconnected. If it's too fast it becomes a drone or in the case of Myeros and this would be the chaos that people spoke about. With the next work we go further back in time but we move forward in Myeros time because the series Space Invaders is from 2002. As an historical artifact actually Space Invaders or the original software from 1978 is a game that's now part of the architecture and design collection of MoMA and it's a classic of the history of gaming but specifically also of electronic interaction design. Like many early games Space Invaders doesn't have a storyline, it doesn't have heroes, it requires and trains skills and navigation shooting or jumping or driving in this case mainly shooting. So what do we train to navigate through with these paintings? Here we see still basically of the game which is an accelerating succession of pixelated poor images in the form of prehistoric or tribal like aliens and one might want or not want to remember how tribals were thing in the turn of the millennium and I think they're actually coming back as we speak. So let's think of this as a beat as well right the succession of alterations of differential repetitions. We see a determining rhythm that coordinates all these different aspects. An early version of the computer game Space Invaders had a hidden feature or a bug this is not decided or still a question that's in debate that allowed players to double fire by holding the reset button while shooting and my argument here would be that to my heroes it probably doesn't really matter whether it's a bug or a feature of a system but we'll come back to this later. These paintings are interesting because they're very unlike what we've looked at before in terms of my heroes work. They're black and white and they're sort of ecstatic. Six green on cotton there's like no depth really no depth of field to use this CGI term and I understand this work sort of imitates computer generated images and deals with this stimulus vortex but the stimulus vortex becoming normalized so it's like more sort of a gesture of annihilation than critique or distancing. It suggests the way to navigate the avalanche of visual contents and messages short basically shooting at them or maybe double firing at them while in the first work of the series the rhythm seems to be quite rigid and monotonous in the smaller versions we see these curious snapshots they suggest more sort of like a moving target in front of the lens or the eye. These paintings are trying to reflect I guess the fleetingness or the mobility inherent in electronic images or the virtual world. And I think what's interesting to note here I said earlier or I described them earlier as like poor images with technological progress images increase compression they don't actually increase their resolution they become like less high res for example think of the history of the GIF the way GIFs work was to identify repeating patterns and then simplify them they introduced a specific animation style short continuous soundless loop and it's interesting to relate the GIF to Mayoris' work I think divorcing this pictorial information from source material and combining it with text and sound is a lot like what we've been looking at or what have been described as sampling in Mayoris' work the text and image combination has so to say a higher bandwidth to convey nuances and I think that's something that Mayoris was extremely keen on using or tempering with. Another interesting aspect of GIFs is that they're not so they have this lack of authorship and that's something that I don't think we find so much in Mayoris' work but it would be interesting to look into Anyways today most of the GIFs are videos so I want to also come to speak of this one video work that Mayoris had made he created this work titled Michelle Mayoris in 2000 it's a looped stroboscopic interplay with light and image body typography disintegrating the artist's name into what's been described as formless energy and again I could trace back the formless energy analogy into this localizer book that I quoted up from earlier I really see it as a study on visual identity actually so visual identity is the visible elements of a brand such as color and form and shape which encapsulating convey a symbolic meaning that cannot be imported through words the main goals here would be visual distinction and singularity but they appear distorted and multiplied so in order to understand this work a bit better I reached out to the motion graphic designer Till Venich who had been commissioned with the graphic animation what really makes this piece what it is but maybe we take a look at it before I continue yeah I mean I guess you can see the repetitive and different rhythms and how they're animating the image it's a quick, it's a hard rhythm alternations of speaking of silence there's like outbursts and time appears broken and accentuated the colors are soft and pastel violet and acidic yellow sort of like washed out or faded and we see these geometric figures the triangles dissolving from grits and sort of a streamlined font that suggests speed there's a beautiful oral history piece by sound archivist Paul Pauloon from Berlin where an unidentified but apparently well informed member of the 90s club scene in Berlin mentions that there were not so many people working intensively with video and projection but Till the person who made this animation when Till arrived with his RGB stuff we were all blown away so this was like fairly new to look at at the time when the video was made and moving image Till Venich told me was back then mainly used as a light source in the clubs and I'm citing again from this book Localizer 1.0 the perfect interplay of light, music and stroboscope breaks down the dancing mass into formless energy form and shape are avoided the individual body becomes untethered there was never a sound for the video and this is perhaps also due to Till Venich never making sound for his videos because they were intended to be shown in clubs and he did say that he listened to music when working just to get a feeling for the rhythm and he probably edited this to like 180 BPMs but sometimes the DJs would use the animated works and slowing them down with a mixer this was a commissioned work and Myeros had delivered the colors and the letters and then the animation was done by Till Venich who had also worked on like bigger scale projects like the Zika Sardar the Victory Column during the 1999 Laugh Parade which is where reportedly Myeros saw Venich's work I didn't find a picture but the following picture was shared with me by Myeros Estate and I want to thank you at this point for your support in the research process we can see here sort of an inspiration for the video installation that was to be made this was obviously again not an exhibition space but a commercial space sort of semi-public with a video wall that was most probably showing commercials and this is the exhibition version pretty close to the inspiration we see again this very rigid grit that seems to be dissolved through the animation and I turn again to the localizer book it reads, I wouldn't like to give the impression of underwriting anything I'm talking about a techno-social process and the course of which the discussion in between painting and no painting could be fully superfluous I don't even speak of extending crusader like the aesthetic experience this is something almost fully achieved by publicity and social communication so it's interesting that the let's say norm or aims for our production within this let's say techno scene would acknowledge whatever marketing had already done or provided and so looking at the video through rhythm and seeing it as a cadence of visual signals flashing before our eyes we can understand really animation as a sort of formal strategy transforming static two-dimensional images into objects or objects into motion and playing with this illusion of life or abstract rhythm I think the flow actually really is important for the works also for the paintings because they help immersing oneself into this picture world which I understand is what my year is after how much time a frame has held for and how much time do I have to absorb it we can again remember what we said in the beginning about the rate and the tempo the frames per second can expand and compress time and the rate at which you blink can sync or not sync with the rate that the edit is cutting into and this video I think really communicates density just through the tempo it doesn't have to do anything with the content and it's perhaps easier to look at the content through memory as we said earlier and it's interesting to note the painting on the right on this image as the painting series from the painting series MM which is derived from screenshots of this video so it's really the sort of like the memory of this moving image and I want to close with another example of this serialized memories of an image which is this pop as Terra also a series and we learned from Bastian Krondorfer, my year's late assistant that this text was taken from a t-shirt that DJ Westbam had worn and now whether you know DJ Westbam or not I think we could argue about if Westbam himself was pop or mainstream but here I want to come back to the double fire function and the question of the bug and the feature and why maybe it doesn't matter it's not a bug, it's a feature it's one of the many offhand remarks that turn into catchphrase and it's perhaps part of what Jordan Wolfson had described as this cultural unconscious in the most conversation I've been mentioned earlier the bug or feature discussion reveals this ambiguity that has always haunted computer programming and thus also the computerized mass culture we feel it reverberating in my year's work too another way we can put this is the polyrhythm of the painting at the train station depending on preferences my year's work could look or feel like a bug or feature it could be painting on steroids but a bug could become a feature something desirable, a short cut, a cheat like the double fire function it just works thank you so much this analysis of Majerius' work through the lens of rhythm is like super original and fascinating and linked to that actually I was wondering if you could maybe identify different rhythm throughout Majerius' practice or like 10 years career wow that's an interesting question thank you yes I think so I saw the exhibition at KW that just opened with the early works which also draw a lot on animation and like comic, like early TV animations I mean now I have to be a bit careful I think the early work is in a way more rigid and has more slower rhythms then comes a period where there's a lot happening and then again we come to these more simple or slogan like works so I think yes there might be something like a rhythm that can be traced through the whole opera thanks any question in the audience thank you for your presentation this picture I didn't get what it is I don't have my glasses so I don't see exactly what it is which one? the one on the black and white no no the last one where we were on the left side this is a screenshot it's really hard to read I'm really sorry this is a screenshot of a documentation video on Michel Marier's and you can see here a photograph of DJ Westbam wearing a t-shirt this actually happens quite a lot and also from early on in Marier's work that he would like repeat things that he finds somewhere and I saw in that KW exhibition how he would take photographs of his paintings and then bring them back into the paintings so I think this was sort of the idea to give this direct reference and what's the date of this painting? sorry? what is the date of this painting? oh sorry okay and the series also of paintings there's like I don't know how many of them like a lot 30 maybe so you're saying something interesting that you know we understood that it didn't really matter as long as he was working in the painting you know what kind of slogan he's using so this is a very political one that is interesting in this context of music where you use these kind of slogans and you don't mean it but you mean it at the same time that I feel like and Karen was saying in an early presentation that there was something more critical and maybe more critical some kind of turn at the end of his practice so we're in 2000 then we're in 2002 in the Brandon book tour we didn't speak about any critical aspect so far on his practice would you say there was something could there be something behind this slogan here or was it just like really just an image I think it's never just an image I think it's always critical and joyful at the same time somehow if that makes sense I think this is what I try to say with this ambiguity right and feature at the same time if that makes sense but there's also interesting there was an exhibition I only remember the German title which was his favourite theme was security, his thesis which was really drawing on a hacker, actually a quite young person living in Berlin who had managed to hack the telecom system and was under very dubious and I think still undisclosed circumstances found that potentially murdered and I think there was definitely a moment when he like was more political than in the works that I have looked at now in this presentation I would also maybe just add because you were repeating that he was not a waiver but obviously this whole scene was something he was relating to so how political is it to actually not doing it but still it's a way of grasping these things and what do we know about him, why he wasn't maybe at ease to go or was there and still he wanted to I mean it feels like he's someone who is obviously I don't know how we should define being political as being an artist but he is very close to his, what was the world he was living in and what he was surrounded by so what? Sorry I think I didn't get the question Okay then thank you in this case Okay and thank you so much for this talk is there any other question? I already have a mic thank you Yeah, thank you Sarah so much and also thank you Karen for your brilliant introductions and curation of the arrangements of the different body of works that you presented here today for the introduction of Mayeros at MUDAM I would like to make a remark about the cultural unconscious that you referred to place the textualizing Jordan Wolfson quote here and I would rather say isn't it more like a hyper consciousness that you are witnessing here since maybe to study the electronic music electronic techno culture is more than understanding surfaces or ego driven celebrity culture but rather go into a post-industrial condition of humans and on that sense I would like to raise a question to you and maybe to you Karen since the imagery that we see here is not only referring to a certain cultural fabric but rather also focusing on and not only male artists, painters but also to very interesting male figures or male animal personifications since I don't know a bunny or a cowboy or an astronaut in plastic or Mario brothers could also refer to a certain kind of reflection on masculinity that maybe you have also reflected upon and I was wondering if you have some thoughts that were imbued in your presentations regarding this aspect I'll let you take this first Karen if you want to answer well I get the impression that he was really quite an introvert and that also this was also kind of an exemplary of his interest in painting or in gaming gaming is a very solitary activity and I also was curious to hear Sarah Joanna speak a little bit more about the stakes that he might have in raving or not raving I mean I for example with there's a collection piece in the state of Lick that's about club dancing and we've presented it a few times and every time they always want to go to the club and I'm like oh my god I'm 37 I can't do this anymore and it's just like okay you can work with that content but then what does it mean to actually have some sort of personal stake in that and I think that if you have not always going to want to go to the club or maybe you have a certain yeah I also got the impression that Majeris was not a partier like he wasn't someone known to drink a lot or do drugs and he had a very stable relationship so I think that there's something to be said about that and what I notice about his kind of approach to masculinity that is that it seems very kind of like conscious and very tender and I think that maybe part of rallying against someone like Kippenberger or Baselitz and this very very very like specifically male history of German painting is also to think through masculinity and I was just talking about this with my intern yesterday about how I specifically maybe have a little bit of an aversion to these German male painters like I can't even really say that out loud but I just did but what I really really resent about some of this work is that the tension in that work is that there are these great male painters who express some sort of vulnerability and that is seen as some sort of like edgy thing that a man would express some sort of vulnerability or femininity or emotion and then to counteract that sort of vulnerability you see these extremely misogynistic and macho personalities in a kind of personal social scene like in Düsseldorf and Cologne and I think that Majeros was completely the opposite I think that he was someone who was very much more carefully investigating that and then also as a person seemed to live a much more kind of like yeah yeah, self-reflective life I'm thinking of what I can add to that I thought it was interesting that in his notes he was like reflecting a lot on male artists but there was not that many female artists appearing in his reflections so I guess like Albert Kruger or Jenny Holzer could have been like references that might be worth looking into and he probably didn't I think these I think there was multiplayer functions already so I'm not sure if he actually played by himself when he was gaming or playing I thought it was also interesting how Kerstin Stakamai described not so much the work but Majeros as a user rather than a hacker or a programmer which maybe goes into this direction of someone being a bit more solitary and rather digesting yeah I think masculinity was probably something that was like the big abstract elephant in the room that wasn't addressed thank you okay thank you so much Sarah