S.Å.T.E. - Sounds at the Exposure Interview

S.Å.T.E. moves on the border between visual art, sound, music and performances This project plays with the meaning of music, influenced by the ‘exposure’ form during performance. A sometimes lighthearted commentary. In this way, everyone in the Sound Jams sessions can contribute to the development of music in a democratic structure. You can also plug in and invite an immense brush to dance. Your musical dance movements can be recorded in malleable surfaces and how do you actually escape the dulled behavior in pop music?

The exhibition took place in the SIGN project space between the 2nd of November and the 2nd of December 2023. Desta Matla talks to me, one of the four artists taking part in the show.

▶▶ More about the exhibition here.

Collective Infrastructures: How to Understand Collectivity

graphic summary of the workshop // Ål Nik

From March 10 to 13, FIBER organized a four day meeting place for artists, designers, creative coders, technologists, researchers, energy experts and policy makers who are committed to, or interested in, working towards a fossil-free and fair internet. The aim of the Natural Intelligence Lab was to fuse existing practices, skills and knowledge, and to form new alliances. In order to start addressing these questions, the lab explored four interdependent and sometimes overlapping research areas: Energy Literacy, Everyday Technologies, Collective Infrastructures and Fossil-Free Imaginaries. Alexandra’s piece connects to Collective Infrastructures by looking at how to find new modes of collaboration and build bridges between existing practices. Radical changes need a collective spirit.

The Development of Egon Schiele’s Line

Walburga Neuzil in Black Stockings, 1913. Public domain.

Although Egon Schiele had a short life, he managed to create more than 3000 drawings and 300 canvases between 1908 and 1918. His intensive work led to the rapid development of his technique and expression. He is famous with his skills as a draughtsman — as such, the line occupies an exceptional place in his oeuvre.

Egon Schiele (1890–1918) was one of the pioneers of the Austrian expressionism at the beginning of the 20th Century. Depictions of the human body (and soul) is one of the firmest motives in his work. A contemporary of Sigmund Freud, he shared a commitment to the psyche that found its first representatives in Vienna in the early twentieth century. Schiele’s artistic development and personal life were expressionist and intense — he worked with impressive energy and speed, was arrested for the offensive and scandalous aspect of his art and died too early, only twenty-eight years old, a victim of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. His work ranges from lyrical but mysteriously uninhabited cityscapes to dark, gloomy and ambiguous allegories. Although his creative path was quite short, within this limited time, Schiele delved into the creation of an extremely distinctive style, which was built on one main foundation and mean of expression — the line.

Egon Schiele’s Peculiar Gestures

Egon Schiele. Portraits of Mime Van Osen. 1910 — photos by Wikiart.org

Not too late after Schiele started drawing a great number of portraits and self-portraits in search of his unique style back in 1910, his models and objects started to make some curious gestures with their hands. Authors and art historians agree that his expressionist style was emerging and the bodies of his models stretched more and more in order to demonstrate different emotions. They believe that Schiele was looking for ways to show what is insight his models and he was not interested in painting their physical likeness. However, what I was wondering about, all the way whilst writing my thesis on his work was: why exactly those gestures and did they mean anything?