If we are to believe the American computer magazine Wired, the esoteric discourse of the art world will have become obsolete in the not-too-distant future. In the future, artists will expand their work “into thematic fields that relate to science, technology and humanism, thus creating the second Renaissance”.

Filmmaker and cameraman Manfred Neuwirth from Medienwerkstatt Wien does not even dare to dream of such lofty, pathetic forecasts of a new age of technology and art fusion. However, his “Multimedia station” Bildermacher, now produced with LOOP TV-Video-Film, is at least a step in this direction.

Originally designed as a linear video and stored on a hard disk, Neuwirth presents 16 types of image-making machines – and thus 16 ways of perceiving and recognizing the world. Each machine – whether a body or space camera, weather satellite, 3D device, an artist's painting crane or the human eye – can be accessed in a user-friendly way via a touch screen. The graphic image menu, which the user can move as desired, works according to the same pattern: explanatory text, produced images, statements.

Men and Machine

Neuwirth wants to counter what he calls the pure technology euphoria with “a typification of a person who works with it.” He justifies the arbitrary and subjective selection of machines with the special aesthetics of their products and their location, which is limited to Austria.
The playful-didactic Bildermacher station, conceived as a model for information systems for a wide variety of institutions, could, according to its spiritus rector, be accessible to a “protected public”, for example in museums or schools. The work, which was presented for the first time at the Diagonale festival in December and which Neuwirth definitely considers to be artistic, will probably be moved from the Medienwerkstatt to the depot in the Messepalast. Then curiosities such as the “Jenseitskanal” (Afterlife Channel) of a researcher who believes that he can generate faces of deceased people using the feedback of images from an empty TV channel, will also pass into the realm of art.

Doris Krumpl, Der Standard