AUT - Franz John
- ArionWhere applying and enrolled students can access AUT course information, check your enrolment status, make fee payments, update your personal details and view your academic results.
- AUTOnlineOnline access to course resources and learning activities through AUT's central learning management system.
- UnicentralUniCentral is the AUT University Student Portal. Here you will find useful information about you as a student and quicklinks to all the important online systems you will need to use while studying at AUT University.
Franz John
 |
| Franz John, Turing Tables, Installation Media Lab, Madrid |
Thursday, May 22, 2008
12.00 noon
Gallery Two
You are warmly invited to a talk by German intermedia artist:
About his project
S W I S S V I S TA
and related projects.
Franz John: Kunstkompatible Projekte
Franz John (born 1960, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) works with human and mechanicalinterfaces using both new and old media to identify the barely noticeable. He visualizes it by making the unobservable visible through large-scale installations, which engage various architecture, places or geological phenomena. For instance, Military Eyes, in which he transformed disusedmilitary bunkers surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge into huge walk-in Camera Obscuras. Another project, Salt Axis, stretches 55 miles overland, creating awareness of the subterraneansalt deposits laid down by an evaoparated ancient ocean in Muensterland, Germany.
One of his recent projects, Turing Tables, was shown in 2006 at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, California, to mark the centennial of the Great Earthquake of 1906. This installationhas both an online component and a gallery presence. Computers gather the human/machinecommunication data stream from seismological institutes’ measurements of earthquakes fromaround the globe and convert them into sound and image in the installation space. According tothe artist, the installation examines “the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is anorganism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.”
The earth as nature at its most awesomely powerful is the subject in many of Franz John’s recent works. However, he has not chosen the viewpoint of a nature-loving Romantic but instead trackshis subject down with state-of-the-art technology; global networks and communication technologies such as the internet.
In his talk, Franz John will present and discuss his upcoming project Schweizer Durchblick (Swiss Vista), in which he intends to create a metaphorical canal between Basel, Switzerland,
and New Zealand.
You can visit Franz John's Website for more information: