Julius von Bismarck - Everything and nothing (de) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Julius von Bismarck - Everything and nothing

His works are inventions, usually connecting technology and software and interactive works of art. To some, says Julius von Bismarck, he’s a designer, to others, an artist, and for the other third, an inventive aristocrat. He has enjoyed success in his work, regardless of which category he is put under, because what he creates is not only exceptional on a technical level, it is also imaginative, confrontational, and critical of society and unexpected at the same time.

In particular, his 2008 work, “Fulgurator”, has made its way through the blogging circuit. He calls this work his "apparatus for a minimally invasive manipulation of photography". This pistol-like device is like a reversely functioning camera which operates via a kind of reactive flash projection that enables an image to be projected on an object exactly at the moment when someone else is photographing it. During Barack Obama’s international election campaign appearance at the Berlin Siegessäule, he used the device to project a bright cross on the lectern, which appears in all other photographs taken of it at the same time. He also used it to project the image of a dove, a symbol of peace, onto Tiananmen Square (Gate of Heavenly Peace), which would then appear in other’s photos of the portrait of Mao. In 2008, von Bismarck received the Ars Electronica award for interactive art for the Fulgurator.

Two former interactive projects of the artist living in Berlin are the “Top Shot Helmet” and the “Fühlometer”, through which one can read the average mood of the Berlin citizens, collected and determined by a sophisticated software system, in the form of a representative smiley-face projected on a huge screen on the Gasometer Schöneberg building. The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is his most recent artistic project. The uninterrupted, continuous stories that are told, according to a basic description of this artwork, flow seamlessly from one topic to another, from one detail to the next. The “Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus” is a drawing machine illustrating a never-ending story by the use of patent drawings. The machine translates words of a text into patent drawings. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext. A significant amount of the things we encounter day after day is incorporated into this patent history—an invention that interminably reminds us of an overly possessive and commercialized world. (wh/jn)

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