Stefan Beck Media Artist

DESCRIPTION

r--r--r-- (read only) As any description can only be accepted as preliminary and indispensable (vorläufig und unumgänglich) I have to give the follwing statement: the artist is not interested in the description, but in a normative approach to the world (Not how it is, but how it should be). All art, though "explicit lyrics", is implicit ethics. Aesthetics = Ethics.

My approach to art is mainly through text, the written and spoken word. This reproduces my opinion that art is by 90% an object of dicourse and not some kind of material thing (this is also true for the so called immaterial arts which deal with video or computer means). So my work stresses communication and collaboration with other people. When I went to Vienna in 1988 I made my first encounter with networks, at that time it was called EARN or Bitnet. At the Institute for Applied Arts Mathias Fuchs and me launched a networkproject on the exchange of maps (Karten) and Weltbilder (Worldviews). With people from the US, GB and Canada we shared pictures (all B&W) over the network and collected them to a Floppydisk and a book publication.

-w--w--w- (write only) Because of the discursive nature of my work it always involves other people. The sole artist has no meaning for me. In 1994 I discovered the basics of networking again when a local node of the net work The Thing has been established at Frankfurt. It had no graphic desktop, all communication went via text exchange. During the year 1994 and 95 I concentrated a great amount of my activities on The Thing. The Thing Frankfurt is available in Internet since 1996!

--x--x--x (execute only) Below you will find a list of projects which are not busy all at the same same time but can be evoked and executed at the right moment:

• "the white visitation"- long term work in progress on the relationship between Art and Artificial Intelligence. Together with Manuela Burghart at Vienna, Austria. It was founded in 1991 as an attempt to get a grip on that phenomenon AI from the artistic point of view.
• UNIXxxx for beginners (steady work on the UNIX Operating System to reveal its inner concepts, to understand user-machine interaction, to offer training where possible.)
• Sake Bar (a temporary installation at various places, to serve Sake (japanese Ricewine) and to introduce new artistic concepts to people who wouldn't come to Art Events otherwise.
• • das seminar (the seminar) is developed from Sake Bar as an attempt to bring art into space which normally don't deal with art but have their own aesthetic expression, like bars, clubs, discos. The main topic is high/low culture, as how the area of high aesthetics is differential from what is generaly considered as "low" asthetics.
• Inter.zin (a project of) a continous WWW opinion base on Art and Cultural Politics at Frankfurt/Main. The first blog. Started in 1995
• freundschaft(industrial-noise musicgroup). Consisting of Oliver Augst, vocal, mix, Stefan Beck, vocal, tape, propaganda, Marcel Daemgen, keyboard, and Christoph Seipel, synthesizer. CD: "Shuffle. Music for compact disc." The first CD created for the shuffle mode of a CD player! Frog Records, Frankfurt. Available through ArtWare, Wiesbaden, Germany.
• • Augst&Beck is a subdivision of freundschaft by Oliver Augst and Stefan Beck towards the exploration of live speech, Sprache, language, parole presented as live performances and experimental live radio shows. They are called The Radioshow, or Sprech-Arbeit or Sprecheinsatz.
• SEXTEXT will, what I hope, gather some texts of mine on gender and machines. As you may know Alan Turing introduced his famous imitation game with a kind of party game, a man and a woman are hidden behind doors and a interrogator has find out of which sex is either of the participants. In a next step Turing replaced one of the participants with a machine. So the game involves three sexes: man, woman and machine. Some have asked if Turing himself cared about the diffence of sex in contrary to the machine. The answer is said to be No, he thought Men and Women to be both thinkers. Well, I think there is quite a difference between how men and women think, although I cannot give clear examples. In SEXTEXT I will give some outlines of my thoughts, mainly related to art and the introduction of women artists into it.
  

PUBLICATIONS

• Postautonomy

  - a reader on art and autonomy. With contributions by Detlev Fischer, David Goldenberg, Verena Kuni and others. Published in 2006 by Gutleut Verlag, Frankfurt. ISBN 3-936826-25-0

• Thing Book

  - the pocket guide to The Thing Franfurt.

• Maps

  , by Stefan Beck/Mathias Fuchs. Documentation of my first network project. 1989. German/Hungarian (that's because the final exhibition was held in Budapest, Hungaria) Available through: Hochschule fuer Angewandte Kunst Wien, Stubenring 3, A-1010 Wien, Austria

• Mit der Henkelkarte in der Tarifzone

  . Textanweisung. 1990. Free, independent textwork . Available through: Verlag Vernon Warren, Windecken (+49-6187-3624), Germany or the author.
• Stefan Beck, Hermann Göring - Ich war niemals Rektor an der Städelschule. 1993. Free independent, computer-related and -generated textwork. Available through: Verlag Vernon Warren, Windecken, Germany or the author.
• Manuela Burghart/Stefan Beck, release/relax/relate. 1992. Documentation of the exhibition release/relax/relate at Vienna 1992. Available through the authors.

OBJECT(S) OF REFERENCE

PERSON(S) OF REFERENCE

Hermann Koch. Ludwig Wittgenstein. Rainer Ganahl. Cees Noteboom. Josef Stalin. Andreas Kallfelz. Verena Kuni. Christoph Blase. Felicia Herrschaft. Thomas Bayrle. Martina Spiegl. Jutta Obenhuber. Marvin Minsky. Egidius Braan. Sascha Büttner. Matze Schmidt. David Goldenberg. Michael Lingner. Nana Petzet. Marcel Proust. Prima leben und sparen. Yutta Bernhardt. Bettina Heininger. 

CONTACT

• Hohenstaufenstr. 8
• D-60327 Frankfurt/Main
• +49-69-741 02 10 phone

SOCIAL NETWORKS

Meet me on

• www.facebook.com/realbeck
• www.myspace.com/realbeck
• www.flickr.com/photos/scratchbeck
• www.xing.com/profile/Stefan_Beck
• ...

SEE ALSO

• Sal Randolph
• Kurd Alsleben
• Michael Lingner
• Detlev Fischer
• Verena Kuni

49822 reads since 02. Jun. 2002