REMOTEWORDS: The Edith Russ Site for Media Art message is a short and succint ON. What do these two letters mean to an art institution that is devoted exclusively to the new media.

Sabine Himmelsbach: ON as a signature has been perfectly selected for an institution that is dedicated to the presentation and mediation of new media art and is therefore open for new distribution contexts and formats. New media artists use all kinds of communication channels – radio, television, the Internet are platforms for their artistic interventions and aesthetic practice. In its programming, the Edith Russ Site for Media Art is reflecting THESE practices. Our exhibitions not only take place in the actual exhibition space, but also on the regional television channel “Oldenburg 1” on which we present current video art once a month, on the Internet (for example the exhibition “My Own Private Reality. Growing Up Online in the 90s and 00s”, which included mostly webbased works) or on the radio (featuring sound based exhibitions like “Sound//Bytes. Electronic and Digital Sound Scapes”).

RW: We have consciously installed an On switch but, at the same time, left out the Off switch. This seems to be symptomatic for the paradigmatic shifts that society experiences via digitalization. What does it mean to be online forever? How do you get feedback using the media to create art?

SH: This shift is indeed paradigmatic. A constantly increasing number of people is communicating through digital networks worldwide. “You” was the person of the year in 2006 in the TIME Magazine, acknowledging the efforts that users all over the world put into their online activities – be it their creation of videos on YouTube or profils on Facebook or MySpace, the upload of fotos on Flickr, writing blogs about their daily lives or political opinions, or other activities like contributing to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to name only a few. The worldwide digital networks and communities have generated a lot of social potential and a creative use of new media technologies. Of course they also contributed to the ever growing mass of information that needs to be filtered daily and the need to get away from beeing constantly ON.
The feedback in the media arts resulted in a lot of artistic practice that is taking place on the World Wide Web itself, using its structures and possibilities to reach a global audience. A lot of artworks are actively engaging other users and are based on their input, creating thus new groups and communities. Examples have also been shown in the exhibition “My Own Private Reality”.

RW: On much equipment, the off switch is in any case obsolete. If the user is not yet online everyday for 24 hours, the machines are. Server and standby appliances such as modems, fax machines, wireless-Lan stations, digital receivers and much more run 24/7/365. Alone in Germany, their estimated power consumption corresponds to the production of 2 nuclear power stations. Are there actually no ecological tendencies in media art?

SH: Of course power is used by technological equipment, no doubt. Ecological strategies in media art take a different approach. They work with the potentials offered by the use of the media to comprehend ecological questions. They draw on the methods and results of scientific research and utilize global communications technologies to actively integrate the viewers into the projects. These projects revolve around the charting of data and their audio visualization. For the most part, they circumvent common scientific technological recording methods and open up new worlds of perception. Last year the Edith Russ Site for Media Art has staged an exhibition that delt with ecological questions. “Ecomedia. Ecological Strategies in Today’s Art” was looking at the idea of ecology as a communicative system. The exhibition presented projects founded on progressive ecological models as well as visions of the future. It examined the role of art and new media over and above science, technology, and ecoactivism.

RW: So – should’nt we set a good example and switch off the recorder now?

SH: OK, switch it off!

For years, Achim Mohné and Uta Kopp have been in close collaboration with different institutions — often joined by scientists, writers and artists — in writing messages on the roofs of exhibition places and museums that are not visible on site but only legible via air and satellite photos. Not till Google updates the satellite data will the messages be readable worldwide in the popular geo-information program of Google Earth or the route finder Google Maps. In May 2011, on the roof of the Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia, the meanwhile sixteenth inscription will be up and running. Over the course of the years a network of markings will emerge that provide an insight into the self-image of cultural institutions and their positioning in digital space.

The REMOTEWORDS work by Mohné and Kopp has placed itself at the interface between the analogue and the digital world. Mounting the gigantic letters onto the roofs of cultural institutions worldwide, for instance, recalls Land Art projects. In the 1970s, the landscape itself became artistic material. Art no longer only took place in the context of art institutions, but invaded the countryside. With REMOTEWORDS, physical inscriptions take place in an urban context that first become perceptible from a bird’s-eye view. The theme of the second essential aspect of the project focuses on the media experience of the world via the computer and the possibilities of global digital networking. The messages on the roofs of cultural institutions are aimed at a global Internet public. The texts are related to the local situation, that is, the self-image of the institution, but can only become distinguish­able medially and after a time delay. The title of the work aptly characterizes the ambivalences thematized in the project. “Remote” describes the difficult accessibility of the words on the buildings’ roofs, as well as their reception via media channels that makes them available to a far distant public.

To broadcast their messages, the two artists use existing media platforms and sys­tems like Google Earth/Maps, Bing Maps or the NAS World Wind, which makes the world experienceable in digital representation. Mohné and Kopp deploy the Internet as an interface for their transmedial strategy. REMOTEWORDS links real space with the digital world of data. REMOTEWORDS’ website embeds the coordinates of the sites inscribed with messages directly into Google Earth or Google Maps. As soon as the data are updated online, they are readable via the services of the respective provider. Location and communication take place by way of, and in, the media. Through their project, Mohné and Kopp react to the fact that the real world is being increasingly overwritten by a network of digital data, which can in turn be called up via the mobile Internet, via laptop, smartphone and at almost any random location.

REMOTEWORDS takes up both the power and the powerlessness of digital observational and communication systems. Besides the practical information — for instance the location of the next restaurant or road directions — it is above all advertising that dominates the so-called Google apps. In response to this increasing commercialization, Mohné and Kopp react with a strategy of irritation. What does the word “ON” mean on the roof of a media-arts institution? How does the user interpret or react to “Click Here” on the roof of an Estonian museum? The words make declarations about the respective institutions, yet intentionally fail to provide any all too simple classification. Their messages are not there in order to advertise the institutions, but to incite our thinking: about the way we behave on the Net, about digital codes and about the use of digital space.

The changes in our society by network technology and the questions of our use of it are among today’s crucial issues. REMOTEWORDS would not only like to thematize these changes, but offer an opportunity to have an actual impact on what is represented in digital space. A concern for data privacy over the past years has meant that Google increasingly incurs criticism. The availability of its own data — in this case, views of a building from the air — is used by the two artists as self-empowerment via a strategy of broadcasting messages atop the globally downloadable images. They thus influence the perception of objects in digital space. Up to now, the inscriptions reflect the possibilities of self-positioning. Along with statements on functionality or the self-conception of an institution, phrases critical of the system itself are also found, such as “Off Limits for Google” on the roof of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. To prevent the inscription of this message in the digital world, Google would have to efface the picture of the building, which has as yet not occurred.

Since 2009 the two artists have invited the public itself to produce inscriptions on a satellite photo and to reflect on the central themes of urbanism, navigation and being digital. One of the main aspects of the work is to reclaim for the social sphere the digital space that exists in media platforms.