Satellites mistaken for stars
By: Alexander Egger
Publisher: Rupa Publishing
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Munich
Language: eng
Number of pages: 180
ISBN-13: 9783940393166
Subjects: Artists' books; Digital art; Graphic arts; Visual communication
Description: Understanding the poetical potential of a refined everyday occurrence. Describing a disbelief in a fixed balance of power, normative aesthetics, and hierarchical contemplative concepts by taking a position and documenting a process of changing values. Objective elements with a translocated place of abstraction are extracted from the immediately visible. Intersubjectivity and metalayers avoiding a one-dimensional easy meaning, but offering a set of viewpoints instead. Giving up the distance represented by the artificial differentiation of marketable, selfsatisfied image-building in order to establish an open discourse regardless of the risk of being vulnerable. Activating the recipients, heightening their sense of awareness, and offering involvement and differentiation in order to shape an identity through friction with the surrounding system. Simple, open results animate the viewer to proceed further with a more complicated interrogation. Omissions raise new questions. Noise, superimpositions, failures and misunderstandings, disturbances, errors, interruptions, resonances, corrections, breaks, encroachments, details, notes, bits and pieces, details and space, emptiness, and silence delineate a relational system of de- and recontextualisations.

Apparently unimportant everyday elements and processes, perfectly integrated into our daily life, adopted and completely assimilated, become banal. Changing the encoding, or else the context, will bring them back into our field of vision. The construction of a subjective system by processing the external influences through deconstruction and exclusion and by suspending and breaking down relationships or establishing different ones. Interpretation and resignification. Varying of the existing rather than heading for the new. An amalgamation of the seemingly contradictory - of coinciding states, a transformation of stagnation into a movement: the moment of change. Shapes interact and react with each other. Individual parts create a new coherence that is visualised by adhering, judging, or simply dealing with it. Establishing a plan of action through a re-politicisation of micro processes: everything is equally important. At the same time, everything could also be different. The definite is obvious and therefore uninteresting. Things are not completely ascertainable through rational logic but are probably already outlined by means of a certain intuitiveness. Confusion, deficiencies, and surprises are weaved into the process as errors, interferences, patterns, and routines and imply an addition of concrete meaning. Contexts, conflicts, and confrontations spark images and impulses that are affected by the viewer's imagination and personal experiences. The pictures remain transient, intermediate results of the development, as fields of possibility; so absorbing them constitutes a continuance and reprocessing.