Foramen Nigrum – The Light in the Black Hole
Exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile, September 30 – October 12 2014.
“After I had left the zone, I realized that the zone was everywhere, the atmosphere had become an atomsphere.”
From the diaries of Johanson Johan Johan
FROM THE STORIES OF 1001 SUNS: FORAMEN NIGRUM (THE LIGHT IN THE BLACK HOLE)
In the year 1999 I decided to start a personal investigation into the world of energy. As it turned out, radiation in several forms had established itself as the omnipresent mainstream media of society but somehow remained absent from our cultural consciousness. Wireless networks, phone systems, GPS location services and radioactive strategies all contributed to the rather new state of immateriality our culture had adopted during the last 60 years of reorientation. Even energy itself was starting to be transmitted via wireless strategies.
Working in the field of binary digital art at that point, I came to understand that I needed to learn more about the underlying atomic and subatomic languages since all the bits in our computers were stored via electrons needing a supporting grid of electricity to deliver the required energy of operation. At that point I adopted radiation into my repertoire of art and examined scientific research sites, nuclear power plants and exclusion zones investigating the world of probability, decay and half-life.
After being invited to the Bienal de Artes Mediales 11 in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Santiago de Chile in 2013, I was also introduced to the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert of Northern Chile by ESO, the European Southern Observatory. Among their observations are the oldest memories of the universe transmitted via radiation bridging distances in the range of thousands of lightyears. Especially the black hole in the center of the Milky Way named Sagittarius A* plays a main role in their investigations emitting pulsing patterns of energy.
For this reason I wish to present several short films and supporting materials from the “Diaries of Johanson Johan Johan” entitled “1001 SUNS” being personal reports of excursions into the world of radiation which I call the “Atomsphere”, all taken during the last 10 years as an ongoing work in progress.
Foto by Juan Carlos Gutierrez Mansilla
As I am planning to finish this longterm artistic process and work in August 2015 for the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan, I welcome this opportunity to recollect and analyse these memories. Surprisingly, it is only now, that the atomic world is slowly starting to fade out of our cultural history making place for new strategies and ideas.
Los invitamos a la inauguración de la muestra De las historias de 1001 soles: Foramen Nigrum (Agujero Negro), del artista alemán Michael Saup, que se presenta en el contexto de la alianza entre el Museo y la Bienal de Artes Mediales.
Una instalación multimedial basada en la experiencia del artista en el Observatorio Paranal en el desierto de Atacama.