«There is more to the picture than meets the eye»
An email exchange between Esther Hunziker and Yvonne Volkart, 2013

Published together with a photo serie of «The Wasted Dicument Showbag Frames»
Modern Matter Magazine, Issue 4, London, amodernmatter.com
available at: mottodistribution.com


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: TWDSF question
Date: 4. February 2013 13:39:01 MEZ
To: Esther Hunziker
Looking at The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames is not really what people expect from a ‘media-artist’. However, reconsidering your portfolio over the years, The Frames makes sense: it is a good example of the way you deal with different media and data, with masses and trash. Can you tell me something about the main idea of this project?


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: Re: TWDSF question
Date: 4. February 2013 16:37:19 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart Volkart
The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames 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.


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: Re: TWDSF question Date: 4. February 2013 20:42:31 MEZ To: Esther Hunziker
Where do you see the difference between these two, the analogue and the digital generated images?


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: answer...
Date: 4. February 2013 22:52:18 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart Volkart
Every single image of the The Wasted Documents Showbag Frames 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. The digital images consist of only one single layer, they are one-dimensional, whereas the analogue variant is multi-layered, each Wasted Documents Showbag Frame is not only an image but also a bag.


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: Re: answer...
Date: 6. Februar 2013 11:05:38 MEZ
To: Esther Hunziker
It is symptomatic that you turn to analogue documents exactly at the moment, when you are digging in your personal ‘trash’, or rather, in your personal history. The latter can be defined as an assemblage of layers, of fragments and traces of forgotten events buried under the surface of the time being. Digital images or even archives have, as you say, no depth, they are always in the here and now, on the same layer. This condition of simultaneity and restless ubiquity of information makes historical or critical thinking difficult. But not only remembering, also forgetting becomes almost impossible: the returning images haunt you. By turning to the analogue document you reintroduce a haptic aspect, inviting us to go in depth, to touch the invisible, to work it through.
However, the aesthetics of the sheer masses, of the series and variations, of the automatic output instead of the personal choice, shows us the machinic condition of your enterprise. Can you tell us why you prefer the masses and the series instead of the well-chosen and unique creation?


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: Re: other question
Date: 7. February 2013 13:03:12 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart Volkart
I think my preference for working with series, not only having one image but 3 or 300, goes back to the medium video where you to deal with thousands of images in motion. I would go crazy to make a decision for just one image, the one and only. One single image out of a series might not be the perfect and absolute one but that’s exactly why I like it.
I like to catalogue things, to deal with the masses and to arrange individual parts in a new context. This is a principle used in several of my works like the alphabet ltd.TM, edinburgh/demon, Dump, IHSE, THRITF or TWDSF.
Sol LeWitt wrote that “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.” I like this prospect.


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: Re: other question
Date: 8. Februar 2013 15:14:17 MEZ
To: Esther Hunziker
You perceive your artistic roots in the area of video and conceptual art rather than in computing like many new media artists do. From the perspective of new media art history though, we may say that even those days of serialism in the 1960s and 1970s were already influenced by the impacts of the machine, the assembly line and the computer. Besides electronic artists like John Cage or Nam June Paik, many non-electronic artists like the mentioned Sol LeWitt or Andy Warhol tried to develop an adequate machinic aesthetics dealing with the impacts of the machine age. That means, if there is enough hybridity, you do not always have to work with electronic media or the newest technical equipment to coin yourself a new media artist. You can be a new media artist also by working through the technical, social, and aesthetic impacts triggered by new media in old media. This is what you do e.g. in TWDSF. Referring to overwhelming data-trash, and addressing our wish for interaction, they are not only pictures on a wall. They are also interactive devices. And this is where your connection to the digital is reinstalled. Looking at your background you did a lot of interactive works. You are one of the few female media artists in Switzerland. How did you acquire this ‘label’ and what did it mean to you back then in the 1990s and at the time being?


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: Re: other question
Date: 8. Februar 2013 15:29:25 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart Volkart
Talking in labels I have been called video-artist. I studied audio-visual arts back in 1993, still in the period of analogue video processing. I was interested in the combination of the moving image together with sound, exploring and experimenting with machine made signals.
Later in my Internet works I was fascinated by the possibilities to expand the medium, to breakout from the linear timeline of 25 frames per second, by the possibilities of interaction and layering. Beside video and audio text became an important element in my works. I was mixing all 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, and with this to the label ‘media-artist’. Whatever: 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...


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: Re: other question
Date: 8. Februar 2013 15:46:53 MEZ
To: Esther Hunziker
Talking in labels, I would say you were a hypertext or hyperfiction artist back then in the 1990s, you created interactive stories, and your aesthetics was, and still is minimalistic, although there are masses or rather series and variations. I have known your work from the very beginning and I have the impression that your contexts are not so much in the international new media art scene, which was a quite a small and often academic group, gathering around festivals like ISEA, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, DEAF, Viper or FILE, focusing on subjects like software art, interactivity, hacktivism and so on. Within the last years, with the rise of digital media in the globalized world, the borders of art and new media art are blurring, and especially the new media art scene fights for a broader recognition. At the same time, in Switzerland, as well as in a lot of other European countries, the funding of new media came to an end. They say new media art is now part of the art scene. Unfortunately, this is not completely true, still, there are gaps, the art scene seems to have difficulties with the often more technical or fluid aesthetics of new media art, and still more technological know how or experimental skills seem to be needed to explore a new media art work.


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: Re: other question
Datum: 8. February 2013 16:22:39 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart Volkart
Yes, it’s a big discussion at the moment. The borders are blurring, you’re right. But the fact is that you hardly see any electronic arts in museums and galleries. 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 well for the media arts! As long as there is no market for the media-arts, it will stay unrecognized by the classic art-scene. How many media art works, besides video, have you seen at the last ART Basel? Everybody want’s to get out of the media-art label, but still, if I show my work, it’s always in the new-media context, festivals or exhibitions specialised in this field.
The financial support in Switzerland disappeared, but the great outcry didn't happen. Why? Where was the fight for recognition? It proofs somehow that there is no homogenous media-art scene; it is as wide spread as the classic art-scene itself with all the different interests and ambitions, that’s why it’s so hard to define it as a whole.


From: Yvonne Volkart
Betreff: final...
Datum: 8. February 2013 18:36:32 MEZ
To: Esther Hunziker
Hm, I don’t think that it is really a question of the market, or of the plurality of the new media art scene. Everything in the arts is in the plural, nowadays. Art fairs are only one segment of the highly contested field of contemporary art. A lot of contemporary art, which you see at dominant and therefore important events like all the emergent Biennales or the Documenta in Kassel, doesn’t seem to have a high market value. The biggest problem of the non-representation of new media art in the dominant circles of contemporary art, from my point of view, is not only about aesthetics or technology, but also about affiliation, and knowledge. In the new media art scene other people than in contemporary art in general play a leading role. In the past, they didn’t know each other, and there was no need to know each other. But now, these borders are blurring, and need arises... Thus, the most important question of every artist and curator, including new media artists and curators is: Who do you want to network with, who do you want to address and from which people, curators, critics, institutions etc. do you want to be acknowledged? In the best cases – that means if one succeeds in generating a lot of attentiveness – all various scenes are overlapping, dissecting, and your name is jumping over from one scene to the other. How about you? Which scenes and audiences were you interested in addressing, and did your interest change within the last 15 years?


From: Esther Hunziker
Betreff: Re: final...
Date: 8. February 2013 18:50:08 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart
I am not thinking of a specific audience when I am doing my work. I never did.
I started doing Internet works cause 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.
Besides, I don’t think the best art is coming out of the question ‘who to network with’.


From: Yvonne Volkart
Subject: Re: final...
Datue: 8. Februar 2013 23:30:57 MEZ To: Esther Hunziker
We could discuss this highly ambivalent subject for hours, but finally let’s have a look into the future. Your recent works have a 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?


From: Esther Hunziker
Subject: Re: final...
Date: 9. February 2013 00:29:11 MEZ
To: Yvonne Volkart

Yes, why not. Let’s discover new networks!