Art in Motion. 100 Masterpieces with and through Media

The exhibition presents time-based media arts as the foremost innovation in the arts of the 20th and 21st centuries; as the moving history of the art of motion utilizing technical devices: from cinema to kinetics, from light to sound. The introduction of motion into art set art itself in motion.

The subtitle of the exhibition references a popular German TV series, 100 Masterpieces, of the 1980s, which in media historical terms indicates a blind spot: although the series was broadcast by the electronic medium of television, the majority of masterpieces it featured were executed in traditional visual arts such as painting.

The canon proposed in the exhibition is based on a new operational method—a rhizomatic network of masterpieces and referential works. The works have not been selected on the basis of the classic notion of an image, which is oriented on painting and seeks to press the new media into the tradition of the visual arts. Media art cannot be separated from devices and machines; therefore, the exhibition defines media art for the first time as dependent upon three conditions: production, distribution, and reception with technical devices. With the camera at the end of the 19th century (E. Mach, E.-J. Marey, E. Muybridge) the study of motion found an appropriate medium for recording and representation. With photography, whose status of art was denied for a century, the scandal of media art took its course. It not only changed the traditional status of an image, but transformed “the entire character of art” (W. Benjamin).

Central to any machine is motion, that is why we speak of cinematography—the writing of motion—and of kinetics—the art of motion. Painting and sculpture are spatial arts; media are time-based arts. Thus clocks, as time machines, are among the antecedents of media. The cogwheels of clocks led to the triumph of wheel-based technologies: from transportation machines (bicycle, train, automobile) to the image machines. Cameras, in which film reels rotated, were developed to record and playback motion, and projectors invented where wheels transported strips of celluloid. From Gutenberg’s movable type via pure motion machines to the moving images and the moved observers (virtual reality): art is increasingly in motion.

Electromagnetic waves were discovered at the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century they replaced wheel-based technologies and became the foundation for radio technology, the wireless telecommunication of data (telephone, television, radio, etc.). The mechanical machines of images and motion became digital image media. Finally, the simulation of motion (cinematography) resulted in the simulation of life (Bio art).

This exhibition offers an innovative parcours through the fascinating cosmos of technical media-based art involving 100 masterpieces and 300 referential works produced during the last 100 years.