Wolfgang
Staehle
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For
Wolfgang Staehle, widely recognized as a pioneer
of the internet
art scene, this will be the first solo exhibition
in New York in
ten years. Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany
and has been
living in New York since 1976, where he worked as
a video artist.
In 1991 he founded THE THING, an independent media
project which
began as a bulletin board system (BBS) and became
one of the seminal
online and offline forums for new media art and
theory.
Staehle most recent work explores the dynamics,
sensations and
implications of connectivity. The exhibition at
Postmasters will
focus on large-scale, real time video projections
from locations
around the world.
Effectively transcending technology into a
somewhat Warholian update
of the landscape genre, the first of these pieces
presented a live
image of the Empire State Building in New York. "Empire
24/7" was
included in the "net_condition" show at
ZKM Center in Karlsruhe
in 2000 and in "loans from the nvisible
museum" at Yerba Buena
Arts Center in San Francisco.
Staehle's exhibition at Postmasters will consist
of three new
web-transmissions: the instantly recognizable
television tower
in Berlin, the medival Comburg monastery, and a
spectacular
panoramic view of lower Manhattan.
The projections - a visceral experience in
synchronicity - offer
an instantaneous compression of time and space.
Non-relative terms like "here" and
"now" attain a new meaning
where the literal and the metaphorical converge.
In today's ever-present, frenetic networking of
the the globe
as a way of experiencing anything anywhere
anytime, Staehle offers
the antidote of a reflective slowdown of
beautiful images, close
and far away, static and changing at the same
time.
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