The Artist as Avatar
Comparable to a painter who
transfers his worlds in the form of images to the screen,
Thomas Feuerstein projects images of the world into the artist.
The world is thus not represented as a visual object by the
artist, rather the artist him or herself becomes the object of
his or her art. The artist thus creates a double of himself, an
artificial artist, who allows him or her to work on the
ambiguous phenomena of our time. This working technique points
to a technicalisation of the world which, in the outgoing 20th
century, shows us the world as having been transformed into a
surface where all objects - be they tables, cars, entire cities
or living creatures - appear as readable and encodable texts.
Science, technology and industry program our everyday life
contexts, decode nature and invent new alphabets in the form of
new products. In this way, according to Feuerstein, the whole
world has become world literature. The notion of the subject in
terms of the notion of the artist here proves itself to have
plunged into crisis. The artist has coagulated into a multiple
personality where various fields of discourse intermingle, and
from which heretical voices speak. Thus far, the artist
understands him or herself as a polyvalent text which explores
model functions and viabilities of the artistic subject in the
context of social discourses. As in the work Tausch des
Öffentlichen, the artificial artist can be a virtual
electronic agent or avatar with the help of a neural network
programme. He or she can operate at the interface of private
memory and media-world events by placing news reports of a
press agency into a different context online, interpreting them
and processing them into a novel, as a kind of chronometer of
society. In the EUGEN - Hire all my information project,
the genetic value of information of the artist him or herself,
too, can become the subject of the artistic work. Instead of
feeding traditional information in the form of images or other
artefacts into traditional data banks, such as libraries or
museums, the artist writes his/her own pieces of information,
genetic texts or DNA into a gene or sperm bank (California
Cryobank). In the project Biophily, the hybridisation of
such imaginary drafts, symbolic thinking, and real facts and
events so symptomatic of post-modernity, which is now hitting
against its (millenium) limits, forms another starting point
that recurs in terms of an intermixing of cultural, mythical
and technological fields. The "exhibition text" for Graz
(2000-3. ArtSpace plus Interface) has been compiled from
individual modules and refers to the state of the
media-subjected individual that has been flooded by discourse
and information. It attempts to form a knot by interweaving
single threads with each other - with the knot representing the
situation of the artist as symptomatic of an increasingly
contingently experienced world.