Videoart feature
selection ColognOFF – brave new world
In this articles, Wilfried would like to explain how the Internet became for him that artistic environment, at all, as a medium for creating and disseminating art. In one of his previous articles he explained, that it did not take long time after the coma, despite the loss of memory, that art became again his new living element in the post-coma era.
It was actually like that, that it was not him who was searching for art, how could he while he did not even know what art could mean to him at all, it was art which found him, respectively his internal burning desire for becoming creative. That’s a difference! When it was recognized, that he had lost the affinity for the “material”, people surrounding him were extracting this as a recognition from what he was trying to express verbally, then only the Internet was left as a virtual medium, but also in case of that, it was rather the Internet that was finding him, than he had been searching for it.
All these running processes had an enormous speed, therefore one could get already the proper impression that his affinity for art was already genetically rooted through the internal creative conditions. But it was primarily not him who recognized all the correlations, but his congenial partner Micha, it was him, for instance, who recommended Wilfried to install already at the end of 1999 his own server for the future activities in the Internet, although neither he, nor anybody else could know, whether the Internet was an appropriate art medium at all, and Wilfried could be able to become active and use it in a way with just the limited knowledge of programming in the JAVA language. Probably, it was like that, that for him only the FUTURE, thus the “Unknown” was existing and counting which was offering any living perspectives. Because there did not exist any PAST on which Wilfried could build anything on, and the PRESENT was overwhelmed with thousands of questions, but no answers. As a virtual medium, the Internet turned out to be the ideal environment, in theory first, because 1999 the technical standard was extremely low, Wilfried started with a 28K modem and a very low monitor resolution. So, the use of the FLASH software by Macromedia, making vector-based animations possible of an extremely small size, was ideal for creating the first works for the net which could stream immediately despite the small bandwidth of speed.
So, Wilfried approached art and the Internet differently than any other person, because there had been no knowledge fundament he could build on. He was looking on technology with completely different eyes, because there was nothing else his FUTURE could be built on, at all, Wilfried did not remember the times when there was no technology like that, he had no experience in anything, but a vision, even if the final goal and the way to go there was not just vague, but completely unknown, but Wilfried was following the bright light of his intuition. This obviously only proper way of doing was showing, how fast the progress was developing, how fast Wilfried entered a professional environment where as a creative person he could be a “primus inter pares”, as if this had been his destiny.
Later after Wilfried had recognized that and how his previous life before the coma was looking like from the point of view of close relatives like his mother and Micha, and not only his physical existence but anything which was characterizing him as a personality had been destroyed, Wilfried was not sure anymore whether he should be happy to have found his destiny based on the complete destruction as the result of going through hell first suffering from immense trauma. But luckily, Wilfried did not realize its dimensions at that time – the memory was lost!
a complementing video selection
Victor Ripoll, (Spain) – Don’t Move, 2014, 2.34
Vibeke Bertelsen & Frederik Hilmer (Denmark) – Transient and Luminous, 2012, 4.04 min ***
Raquel Claudino (Spain) – Sing The Sand Into Pearls, 2014, 13:05
