Bjørn Melhus,"Screensavers" (螢幕保護超人),LED螢屏上的多媒體互動裝置,2008
(13 November 2008 - 22 April 2009)
LED牌碑上的超級英雄
享譽國際的媒體藝術家 Bjørn Melhus的數位複製作品Screensavers,這件作品將在近幾個月內於慕尼黑的OSRAM Haus大樓之前立植七個螢幕,螢幕中顯示的是其聲音互動的電腦動畫,而這些動畫的影像與文本都是由現實中的廣播節目所衍生出的。藝術家乃是對大眾媒體有形可見的日常語言提出其見解態度。
This art project marks OSRAM's first cooperative effort with the information radio station B5 aktuell,
which will provide the material for the art installation. With the help
of sound and speech recognition software, the artist will generate
image and text sequences in real time from the current program of the
information radio station B5 aktuell.
Bjørn Melhus thinks far into the future with regard to both artistic
contexts as well as technological concepts. The visual program
sequences for Screensavers were developed and created together with
specialized programmers. By means of a software program, the words
spoken on the radio are partially transformed into image and text
sequences that then appear on the stelae. In the case of a few
predetermined key words - such as "art," "catastrophe" or "traffic jam"
- additional image and text sequences that provide visual comments on
the spoken words are triggered. Comic book heroes, the Screensavers, appear on the SEVEN SCREENS during the brief presentation breaks.
Ivo Wessel, Rainer Kohlberger and Mike Orthwein developed and made the visual realization of the project possible.
With his most recent work the artist reacts to the installation's site.
The Mittlerer Ring in Munich is a very busy road and approximately
90,000 automobiles pass by the light stelae each day and with them a
great many viewers, whose common public space is not a visible but
audible one – the radio. If television connects millions of living
rooms with each other, then it follows that the mass media specific to
driving is the radio. This thought serves as his starting point when
Bjørn Melhus makes the radio the basis of his media reflecting,
critical and artistic work, the Screensavers.
Bjørn Melhus lives in a media-driven culture, as an analyst,
protagonist and – like us all – a consumer. In his work, unlike other
artists, he deals with the stocktaking of media-cultural creations,
such as film and television, and thereby scrutinizes the reciprocal
relationships between the individual, the masses and the medium. A
recurring motif is the double (Superhero), the reproduced individual who is always embodied by the artist himself.
BJØRN MELHUS
Bjørn Melhus was born in 1966 in Kirchheim/Teck. Bjørn Melhus studied
creative art from 1988 to1997 at the HBK in Braunschweig. He has
received a number of scholarships, including ones from the DAAD at the
California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and from the state of
Niedersachsen at the ISCP in New York. He has had solo and group shows
in New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, Moscow, Milan,
Madrid, Zürich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and
Munich. Bjørn Melhus has been a professor of fine arts and virtual
realities since 2003 at the Kassel Art Academy. He lives and works in
Berlin.
OSRAM ART PROJECTS: SEVEN SCREENS, Munich
In addition to the GALLERY and COLLECTION, since November 2006 the
OSRAM ART PROJECTS have included the SEVEN SCREENS. With the help of
state of the art LED technology, the latter realizes the company's wish
to combine light and art.
Dr. Christian Schoen, director of the OSRAM ART PROJECTS, is a renowned art historian and critic.
More information is available at: http://www.osram.de/art/sevenscreens