Posted on: 18. Februar 2013
#Draft #Text #Thoughts #TWDSF

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More: “There’s more to the picture than meets the eye.“ – Neil Young

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The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames: The work is a follow-up project of The Harddisk Random Image Trash Files series. Both works are digging into my personal trash, wasted material from different projects like error images, text scripts, sketches, copies, photos, video-stills, research material, inspirations, press clippings, etc. Private material that was never meant to be public, nor being art in itself.
In both works I was interested in the image produced by chance, not thinking too much about aesthetics or visual qualities. While The Harddisk Random Image Trash Files were auto generated digital collages, produced by software, The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames is the analogue variation, not rummaging through large masses of digital data, but through my dusty private archives, boxes and folders.
In exhibitions the series is arranged as a large wall installation. Each frame is available for sale individually. Frames come and go, if one is sold, it is replaced by a new one. The installation will always change. It is a work in progress. Currently there are about 300 Wasted Documents Showbag Frames and my archive is far from being empty.

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Song: The radio plays the song 'Empire State of Mind’ by Jay-Z. – Current time is 18:45

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Keywords: collage, layering, patchwork, storage, archive, random, background, foreground, construction, deconstruction, order, disorder, fragments, codes, repetition, chaos, noise, failure, aesthetics, mixing, scratching, interaction, correlation.

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Chance operation: “Chance operations are not mysterious sources of ‘the right answers’. They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory.” – John Cage

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Catalogue: I like to catalogue things, I like to deal with masses of material and I like to arrange individual parts in a new context. This principle of remixing I used in several of my works like the alphabet ltd.™, edinburgh/demon, Dump, IHSE, THRITF or TWDSF. I am a collector more than a hunter, a finder more than a seeker.

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Loop: Dump is a work about communication that pretends to say something but does not. There is no storyline, no thread, no beginning and no end. The pictures and words stand for themselves. There is no difference between important and unimportant information. Everything is relevant. Nothing is purposeful. Everything gets stuck in an endless loop and loses itself in madness. – Dump, 2010/2011, website/installation, interactive 2-channel computer-projection, sw, sound

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Google: In my time of deepest sorrow I googled the word happiness. The result in 2002 was 2’850’000 entries. The result in 2013 is 304'000'000 entries. An inflation of happiness. – TWDSF Nr. 014, Layer 5.

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Audio-visual arts: I studied audio-visual arts back in 1993, still in the period of analogue video processing. I was interested in the interaction of the moving image with sound, exploring and experimenting with machine made signals.

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Betrayal: I smoke a cigarette. I know I shouldn't. Anyway. – Current time is 20:05

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Perspective: The video Chongqing is an animation of over 200 photographs. Cutouts from the sky, framed by modern skyscrapers, shot in Chongqing, a megacity in the southwest of China. The images move to the sound of the Yangqin, an old traditional Chinese instrument. The concrete buildings start to dance. Different perspectives open up various perspectives of the sky, sometimes narrower, sometimes brighter, sometimes smooth and soft, sometimes aggressive or threateningly apocalyptic. – Chongqing, 2010, video, sw with colour, sound, 16.50 min.

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The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames: Every frame is more than just its surface. Unlike in digital assembly technology, the images do not consist of a one-dimensional surface but contain multiple layers, visible and invisible. Each frame is a kind of showbag (Wundertüte) that was filled – it remains unclear what’s all inside. Perhaps an interesting text is hidden behind a photograph or a cheap Xerox copy covers an original drawing.
The material is kept together just by the glass of the frame. If you buy a frame you could open it and have a look inside, rearrange its contents, remove individual parts, bring the background to the foreground, make the invisible visible. You could destroy the original artwork and create your own out of it. To do so, you would have to break the seal of the frame. The decision is yours.

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Always: A face, a video signal – slowly dis- and reassembling continuously, always in between, never stable. – Copy, 1994, video, 3.10 min.

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Audience: I am not thinking of a specific audience when I am doing my work. I never did.

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Dirt: A green notepad, hardly readable, saying ‘mmmh, I feel dirt but I don’t care’. Must have been drunk when I wrote this. – TWDSF Nr. 091, Layer 1.

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Series: I would go crazy having to make a decision for just one image, the one and only. I think my preference for working with series goes back to the medium video where you to deal with thousands of images in motion. One single image out of a series might not be the perfect and absolute one but that’s exactly why I like it.

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Tourist: “At home she feels like a tourist. She fills her head with culture. She gives herself an ulcer.“ – Gang Of Four ‘At home He’s a Tourist’

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Art: Sitting at my table, turning my head, I see a framed drawing by Johann Hauser. – Current time is 20:35

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Labels: Hypermedia, electronic literature, digital poetry, hypertext, hyperfiction, interfiction, new media art, electronic art, multimedia art, net-art, web-art, digital art, interactive art, video art, conceptual art –all labels that has been used to describe my work. Choose whichever you like…

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Endless: EHB5866 is the name of a fictional galaxy. The video shows an animation of a single photography, showing the Mars moon Phobus. The image is multiplied a hundred times and builds a galaxy of its own by rotating endlessly around itself. – EHB5866, 2012, video, bw, sound, 15.00 min.

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Destiny: A street, a room, a live, a room, a live, a room, a street, a house, a life, a room, a life, a room, a street, a house, a world, a live, a destiny, a world, a room, a live, a house, a destiny, a house. – Egoexpress ‘Aranda’.

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Machine-trip: Sadly, I never experienced the Winterberg machine-trip myself. – TWDSF Nr. 122, Layer 1.

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Internet: In my Internet works I like the possibilities of interaction and layering. The Internet allows to break out from the linear timeline of 25 frames per second imposed by video. Besides video and audio, text has become an important part of my work. I am mixing different elements like graphics, audio, video, plain text and hyperlinks. With the Internet works I got from the analogue to the digital, from the linear to the non-linear.

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Mess: Just came back from a seven-month residency in Berlin. My studio is a mess. – Current time is 21:06

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Internet: I like the medium for being cheap and independent. You are dependent on neither curator nor the holy halls of a museum. You create your own exhibition by uploading your data. Everybody can experience your work, anytime, anywhere. Probably not the best (commercial) career strategy, considering the art market.

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Monster: “In the forest is a monster, it has done terrible things, so in the woods it’s hiding.” – P.J. Harvey ‘Who Will Love Me Now’

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Saturation: A good mixtape is more than just the sum of individual songs. The first song on my mix Nr.126 is “Saturation” by John Frusciante followed by “Hermione” by David Bowie. Beautiful songs! – TWDSF Nr. 045, Layer 3.

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Night: At first glance the images from the Imagines series look like abstract photographs with small black dots arranged on a white surface. On closer inspection the black spots can be identified as real insects, ephemeral mayflies. The insects were attracted by the neon lights of my studio, the next morning they lay dead on the floor. I fixed their position with transparency film. Each image represents a single night and shows a random pattern, written by the night and the light. The pattern reminds of a (negative) distant starry sky. – Imagines, 2012, image series, paper, insects, transparency film, each 122 x 200 cm.

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Careering: There is bacteria

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Sale: The price of 1 Wasted Document Showbag Frame is CHF 299.-. Get 10 for the price of 9! Discount code ‘modern matter’, valid till 1.6.2013! Order today: hunziker@ref17.net!

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Function: “The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of his premise.” – Sol LeWitt

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New media art Last year I was showing an interactive computer projection in a museum, at the opening the curator was talking about a video installation – it seems something is still not working perfectly well for the new media arts.

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Highly ambivalent subject: Let’s drop this highly ambivalent subject.

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Tears: A photograph of my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where I lived in 1992. During my entire return flight to Switzerland I was crying. – TWDSF Nr. 059, Layer 1.

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Spam: Master bass roomier Hart, copper late aborted. Yeah instrument magnificent loved. Cleared emptied consumption showoff languages listening dithering become, long Agents. – Email 12.2. 2009

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Void: The 100 photographs from the series IHSE show architectural buildings, geometrical structures, which transcend the forms of classical architecture, having neither top nor bottom. Architecture floating in the void. Buildings which look like concrete capsules by which one can travel into a different space-time continuum. – IHSE, 2011/2012, interactive animation/photo series, xerographies, each 841x1189 mm.

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Joy: It’s snowing outside. – Current time is 21:18

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Self-interview:
EH: Your recent works have an utopian aesthetic. You build up new galaxies out of a single picture, you create negative starry skies made of real mayflies, you rebuild existing architecture into strange looking spaceships. Do you leave the ground now? Instead of working through your own dusty waste, are you now travelling through a new, beautiful and well-organized space-time continuum?
EH: Sorry, could you repeat that question?

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Exercises: There once was a time when I stood with my head on the ground and my feet in the air. The photograph of the cloth on the floor is an evidence for my headstand exercises practised in Helsinki in 1999. – TWDSF Nr. 110, Layer 1.

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Repetition: “Repetition, Repetition, Repetition.” – Mark E. Smith

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Cheap: A video of a nightly walk through the woods is shown on a surveillance monitor. Black and white, without sound, recorded with a cheap infrared surveillance camera. The forest is presented in diffuse shades of grey. – Tier (Animal), 1996, installation, mixed media.

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Disco: The shiny silver disco-ball behind my table was once a world globe. – Current time is 21:43



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