New Exhibition

Runtime: 10 December 2008 - 10 February 2009

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the sense of the mysterious.”
Albert Einstein

net.culture.space exhibits artistic works and projects that creatively and playfully lead you into a mysterious, fantastic realm of digital illusions. Through interaction and animation, these projects generate worlds of sounds and images that blur the boundaries between virtuality
and reality.
At the opening, the Cologne-based artist community LICHTFAKTOR invited all visitors to participate in an “active” installation that made it possible to paint, write and draw with light.

PROJECTS:

CHIC-O-MAT
by Kate Burgener, Artistic Direction and Idea
Juerg Luedi, Corporate Design
Michael Nussbaum, Technical Realisiation
www.poolart.ch/chic-o-mat/index.htm

Memory with a twist: Visitors can virtually alter their appearance, age and sex. The picture of another person is superimposed on an automatically generated self-portrait. It is like looking in a mirror and suddenly encountering a familiar yet at the same time unknown face. In this interactive process, the participants thus become researchers into identity and representation.

PHANTASM
by Takahiro Matsuo
www.monoscape.jp
 “Phantasm“ is an imaginary place in which people and the world of nature interact. You enter this realm holding a glowing sphere in your hand. Butterflies react to the light, fly close to it and
follow it. If you cover the sphere with your hands, the butterflies disappear and you return to the real world.

DIORAMA TABLE
by Keiko Takahashi
www.th.jec.ac.jp/~keiko
 “Little table, set yourself!”: The “Diorama Table“ is an interactive installation that links art with everyday life. If you lay ropes on the table, they connect to form railway tracks; if you form a circle out of rope, it is transformed into a pond. In this way, objects of daily use are transformed
into interactive, animated images.

OPTISCHE TÄUSCHUNGEN
by Michael Bach
www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html
People have known about optical illusions since Aristotle. In the 21st century, many new and fascinating phenomena that deceive our perceptions are still being created. The latest brain research can by no means explain all these phenomena; many of them still elude systematisation. Prof. Dr. Bach exhibits a collection of optical illusions and visual phenomena together with attempts to explain them, to the extent that they are understood by current visual research.

S.H.E.
by Nataša Teofilovic
www.aec.at
Where does virtuality end and reality begin? s.h.e., a game with virtuality and reality, keeps the boundaries between these two worlds open. Imagine five 3-D animated characters that live in their own world. The figures wander from image to image, and in order to do so, they have to “cross“ spaces that belong to the real world, with the result that for the observer, virtual space and real space appear to overlap. The visitors encounter the virtual characters at eye level,
which opens a communication space that is intensified by sound effects such as knocking.

LICHTFAKTOR
by Marcel Panne, David Lüpschen
www.lichtfaktor.eu

The Cologne-based artist community LICHTFAKTOR, consisting of VJ $ehvermögen and JIAR, experiments with the possibilities arising from time exposure and painting. In their works they attempt to stretch the limits of various ”light writing” approaches and develop them further. They express their creativity through light. The LICHTFAKTOR crew consciously uses the entire urban space as a stage and a sphere of action and they integrate it into their animations in such a way that it does not merely serve as a setting but actually becomes part of their work.

TIMES AT CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR 
24 December 2008 – closed
25 and 26 December 2008 – 12 noon to 8 p.m.
31 December 2008 – closed 
1 January 2009 – 12 noon to 8 p.m.