100 Days - 100 Imachinations

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Peter Weibel (head of the ZKM Karlsruhe) describes one of the major qualities of the Imachination project as follows: “Emerging at the same time dislocated in different places the Imachinations are both - either original or copy. One image is not the reproduction of the other one. Though you see very obviously a radical jeopardize of the classical image, that is to say the notion of the original and originality.”

The Imachinations are an exploration of the materiality and the placement of images. The art project asks for the experiences made with images changed by machine interaction and the internet.

The first time the “100 Days - 100 Imachinations” took place for 100 nights parallel to documenta 11 on the campus of the University Kassel in the form of a digital projection. On the screen of 9 by 11 meters every evening a different image appeared, that a projector received by a special program via internet (view scheme).

Because of its immaterial home in the World Wide Web the image could appear also in other places but in different contexts and medial forms. So the Imachinations appeared at the same time in the Walter Storms Gallery in Munich. The abstract stripe images had been shown there on a flatscreen presented like a conventional picture on the wall.

The Imachinations are simple but complex. The Imachinations are not only a research for the location and immateriality of images, but they work also with the simplest form of complexity: the overlay of only two different structures, in this case two wavelike scaled patterns base on Pi.

The Imachinations differ from conventional, immanent internet art projects. Linking to a material context they open new scopes and opportunities of perception. The quality of the project is that it can’t be subordinated by only one medium. It is an internet project, it is painting, it is light art and it is an exploration on the nature of the notion of image used in science and the arts.

The 100 day projection series function as model. Beside this phenomenological aspect the main medium to explore the imachinative spectrum are interviews, which make it possible to show and compare the range of views of the members in the imaging chain. During the project the "reactive zone" will function as a platform of dialogue that is to say as a “notepad” of the exchange between the imaging avantgardes of different disciplines.

The first place of the reappearance of the Imachinations in 2003 was a research station on Spitsbergen/Polar Sea. This most northern knot in the WWW reflects the delocalizing aspects of the web. Above all presentation throws light on the relationship between image information and data, between measuring and taking a picture.

A further place of appearance has been an imaging conference at the University of Magdeburg. This symposium gave the opportunity to talk with experts from various disciplines reflecting the question “what is a picture or an image?”. After the 5 day presentation as a projection of 7 by 5 metres in Magedburg, the Imachinations became more and more ubiquitous. Not bound to a fixed place they appeared delocalized day per day in new places mainly in Germany. The question “where is the image”, when it appears at least in two places at the same time, now needs to be progressively repeated. Finally one of the two images could have changed its physical place….

The continuation of the project was initiated by Peter Weibel, who invited me to present the project at the ZKM Karlsruhe (Center for Art and Media Technology). In Karlsruhe the Imachinations will be presented now in 2004 as a backprojection (3 by 12 meters) in the “SubRoom “ of the big glass cube architecture. At the moment I am weaving a web of cooperating institutions from the arts, sciences and the information technologies.

(source: T. O. Roth, http://gsb.haifa.ac.il/~sheizaf/AOIR5/96.html)