Deep Dive

MR Installation  |  Quest 3  |  Work in Progress

Deep Dive is a mixed reality installation that uses headset technology to offer a smooth transition from the real and immediate exhibition environment into an atmospheric simulation. The interactive installation creates a novel experience with unique aesthetics to unfold a narrative that explores the Anthropocene, the geological era dominated and shaped by humans.

The viewer is immersed in an essayistic journey that reflects on humanity’s greatest challenge to transform its environmental impact sustainably and the rampant exploitation and burning of environmental resources. Deep Dive sees itself as an artistic examination of the global climate crisis that aims to evoke empathy for scientific facts. As a philosophical reflection, the work aims to inspire a global sense of responsibility and the urgency of taking action.

On the technical side, the project centers on exploring
the possibilities and options of latest mixed reality hardware.

After putting on the headset, viewers first find the familiar exhibition situation around them. The familiar outside world is brought into the VR glasses thanks to the passthrough optics, but simulated organic structures soon grow out of the ground until the viewer is completely surrounded by an abstract natural landscape. This growth phase is a leap back into a primeval past, from where the Anthropocene is recapitulated in all its phases.

As soon as the storyline reaches the impending rise in sea levels due to the melting of the polar ice caps, the exhibition space is flooded by a roaring, slowly rising water level until viewers are completely submerged in the flood and find themselves surrounded by surging masses of water…

In Collaboration with Hera Project | HTW Berlin

Deep Dive was selected by the XR Open Call jury of HTW Berlin’s AURORA XR School for Artists in April 2024. As a result, it is now being developed in close collaboration with HTW’s interdisciplinary project team, with co-funding from the European Regional Development Fund under the INP-III program and the kind support of the Senate Department for Culture and Community.

Splatter

3D Fluid simulations  |  PLA | 21 x 21 x 40cm

Swipe The Flood Away

Tobias Bilgeri and Jens Isensee, 2024 | Interactive Video Installation


This interactive installation runs synchronously on 9 smartphones. The devices are fixed in a grid on a pedestal and a harmonious, virtual delirium initially plays out on their screens. The player can drift off into various AI-generated worlds and truths. However, this harmony is soon shattered by suddenly popping up disaster scenarios. Cell phone videos of devastating floods, such as those that have become rampant in the wake of the climate catastrophe in recent years, flood the screens like Instagram stories. Initially sporadically and then increasingly frequently, the ideal digital world is confronted with a harsh and brutal reality. In a way, AI simulations and disaster videos have the same hypnotic attraction. No wonder, since the field of tension between environmental dystopianism and AI tech utopianism is a field that is cultivated and harvested by the attention extractivism industry.

Paradoxically, the only action left to the player in these events is to swipe the disaster stories off the screen, as is familiar from social media apps. The hermetic game loop intensifies until the events flood all channels like a torrent. Here, the installation concept addresses how human consciousness tends to repress itself when overwhelmed by the complexity of the global situation, instead of moving into action. The escapist nature of media production and a belief in technology and progress that is as tempting as it is fatal are critically juxtaposed in the form of these lucid AI dreams. The simulation comes full circle when the question of the inevitability of this end finally appears on the screen and a new beginning is offered via swipe.

Monthly Global Disasters

Media and news communicate global events with varying frequency and depth, but hardly anyone is able to continuously catch everything, let alone process it. Thus the colossal extent, the increase and vehemence of natural catastrophes remains hardly perceptible in its entirety and shall be shown in this composition.

Here is the complete playlist with all previous months.

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New photos of Overgrowth

Interactive spacial video installation  |  Motion sensor, PC, short distance projector,
3D-software  |  2.7 × 1.8 × 4 m  |  2018

I just rediscovered photos from our group show Surviving the Fitness made made by Chris Becher. Thanks to him I got a bit of documentation from that exhibition in Kunstverein Wolfenbüttel. You’ll find more information about this interactive installation right here.

Kleinholz

Room installation | cardboard, paint, hot glue | 6 x 8 x 3 m

Artificial Answers

Short animation film | HD, 6:00 min | 2020

An animated speculation on whether and how artificial intelligence could answer existential questions of humanity.

The short film stages a search engine environment and the AI questioned in the plot gives its answers in the form of collages from documents, images, sounds and quotations from well-known philosophers and historical intellectuals. The real question remains whether machine learning can succeed in linking these many coherent and conflicting fragments on the meta-level into a new guiding principle that is able to answer the agonizing questions of our time.

This digital work was created in collaboration of Cat Scott (UK), Smruthi Gargi Eswar (IN) & Jens Isensee (GER) during the CoLab TechArt Fellowship 2020 with Jaaga, British Council India, Goethe Insitute Bangalore and was supported by Islington Mill.

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Reality Glasses

Experimental Short Film and Video Installation | carton, acrylic, hardware
0,6 × 0,7 × 0,5 m | 6:59 minutes | HD | 2022

Reality Glasses is an essayistic short film about how humans created their own realities ever since. In the installation version it can be viewed only on a specially constructed headset made of cardboard and acrylic lacquer with hardware components.

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Virtual Materialism

Interactive spacial video installation  |  Motion sensor, PC,
short distance projector, 3D-software  |  2.7 × 1.8 × 4 m  |  2019

In this interactive video installation up to 4 recipients are confronted with a virtual recreation of themselves out of objects and stuff. In a way they are becoming interactive ready-mades. The masks on the figures in the virtual mirror recite an acoustic collage of text fragments from the essay ’The Imaginary‘. It’s an early book by Jean-Paul Sartre which is a phenomenological study of human imagination. In it, Sartre distinguishes between perception and imagination which he identifies as humans ability for creating reality.

The work also has an immersive level. The viewers which are re-embodied out of objects and things, can move around and collect virtual coins that appear out of thin air in the virtual space. They even have to do it to sustain themselves, otherwise someone else wins and rest will disintegrate. This Win-Loose-Loop continues endlessly. The recipients could listen to the speakers, but the temptation to get lost in the spectacle is enormous. Also the exhibition environment is reconstructed in 3D to condense the experience of a reflection in this site-specific installation.

This project is a cooperation Jens Isensee and Rico Possienka. The installation is made with Kinect Sensor and Unity 3D and an ultra short distance projector connected to PC rendering hardware.

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Too Much

experimental animation | 2017 | 8:13 min | 1 trailer | 7 images | 411 words

This shortfilm is a disturbing experimental drift and a mediagrotesque about telecommunication as a medial game of powers. With a textcollage freely adapted from Nietzsche how Foucault has red him. While the view wounders through the zapped channels they start drifting away into an extatic overdrive. The subtitles are translating the medial noise into an atmospherical meta. A textual contemplation about how communication is becoming a question of force.

Watch video | Read more…

Wheelwork

4-channel video installation  |  LCD-screens, mini-PC, fans, carton, acrylic
0,8 × 0,7 × 1,3 m  |  2016

The Wheelwork is a 4-channel video installation made of cardboard with integrated LCD-screens. Through four apertures in this sculpture its simulated inner workings can be seen, a mechanism made of wooden gears that was filmed in the historic mill ensemble of Heiligenrode.


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Overgrowth

Interactive spacial video installation  |  Motion sensor, PC, short distance projector,
3D-software  |  2.7 × 1.8 × 4 m  |  2018


Overgrowth is an interactive spacial video installation with integrated motion sensor, PC hardware and a short distance projector. The sensor of this interactive installation detects the viewing angle of a spectator in front of the projection and the 3dimensional scenario is generated and displayed according to the recipients perspective. The viewers hand movements are captured as well and transferred into the virtual space. As light spots they float over the scenario and organic structures are sprouting at the corresponding places on projected wall.

The spectators interactions generate an organic structure which is growing excessively until its complexity reaches the systems rendering limits and the players interactions are shrinking structures again. The result is a vital and diverse play of prosperity and transgression in a closed, self-regulating sphere. The spectator is thus emancipated from his passive role to become the designer of an individual sculpture. After leaving space, the generative structure resets itself, making the sculpture temporary and processual. | Read more…

White Washing Parade

Figuren und Fundstücke, bemalt  |  Figures and finds, painted
2,2 × 1,3 × 0,5 m  |  2016   | Read more…

Wildnis

Group of Objects  |  Objektgruppe 
3 × 4 × 2 m  |  2016  | Read more…

Deutschland im Herbst

‘Germany in Autumn’  –  Found objects, carton, wood  |  Fundstücke, Karton, Holz
1,6 × 1,7 × 1,9 m  |  2016  | Read more…

2nd World

Map, carton, hot glue, acrylic |  ‚2. Welt‘, Landkarte, Karton, Heißkleber, Acryl
0,8 × 0,8 × 1,1 m  |  2016  | Read more…

Deformation

Interactive sculpture  |  Disco ball motors, motion detectors, acrylic, wood, carton
0,7 × 0,9 × 1,3 m  |  2016

This Installation detects movements and its extremities begin to deform in opposing rotations. The spectator becomes part of the process. | Read more…

Objects for Subjects

Carton, acrylic lacquer, hot glue  |  ‘Objekte für Subjekte’, Karton, Acryllack, Heißkleber
1,4 × 3,2 × 0,2 m  |  2016

Off, Over and Out

Wood, art prints, light chains, hot glue  |  2.4 × 1.6 × 0.3 m  |  2015 | Read more…

Homeland, values and blazons

‘Play’, ‘Hunt’, ‘Work’, ‘Dinos eat Jesus’ and ‘Rooster’ | Fireworks, game pieces,
christmas lights, horns, carton
| 0,7 × 0,7 × 0,4 m each | 2011 – 2016 | Read more…

Objective

Interactive video installation | VR, head tracking
0,6 x 0,6 x 2 m  |  2015 
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Channels

Modified hardware, Raspberry Pi, Arduino  |  0.6 × 0.6 × 1.4 m  |  2014 | Read more…

Ascent

cardboard, wood, hotglue, acrylic clear lacquer  |  2.8 x 1.5 x 1.2 m  |  2014 | Read more…

Transit

experimental animation | 2014 | 14:13 min | 3 images | 101 words | Read more…

Procedural Sculptures

Interactive Video Installation | asymetric cam projection | 3 images | 178 words | Read more…

Gegenwartsmühle

‘Mill of Presence’  |  Interactive video installation
Video game machine  |  0.6 × 0.6 × 2 m  |  2014 | Read more…

Ego Tunnel

Autonomous computer installation | PC hardware, cardboard | 1.2 × 1 × 0.8 m

The ego tunnel is an autonomous computer installation. An old PC system was dismantled and all components rebuilt into a new constellation. This newly configured system is only able to observe itself (through a webcam) and reproduce the image of itself in endless repetition. In this sense it is redundant and self-contained as though the system is similarly running a film of itself. This might vaguely be reminiscent of Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher involved in neuroscience who, in his book ‘The Ego Tunnel’ describes the human ‘Self’ as a self-illusion vigorously practised by human beings.


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Receivers


Printed cardboard, hardware, hot glue, paint  |  0.4 × 0.5 × 0.5 m  |  2012
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Pulpit

Cardboard, hot glue, paint, megaphone
1.5 × 1.2 × 0.8 m  |  2013 | Read more…

Neo Kuben

‘Neo Cubes’  |  Land art, series of objects  |  1 – 2 m³  |  2013

A short film for a documentary presentation of a series of sculptures. As the cubes pictured suggest, the artist was keen to transplant these everyday basic square shapes into a completely atypical environment full of organic, flowing shapes. As an embodiment of structure and uniformity, the cubes pose a stark contrast to their environment. The camera carries out captivating, concentrated circular movements around the cubes.


Music: Bach’s Open Goldberg Variations, by Kimiko Ishizaka
Schnitt: Deborah Uhde

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Sonar

Mini computer, microphone, headphones, cardboard  |  0.7 × 0.6 × 0.5 m  |  2013 | Read more…

Arsenal

Paper cuttings, historical world maps, acrylic glass panels |  2.4 × 1.2 m  |  2011 | Read more…

The Imaginary

Interactive film | Pc, screen, camera sensor | 2 × 2 x 1.5 m | 2011 | Read more…

Evergreens

2006 | dead palmtree, lacquer | and 12 ohter breeds

D.A.M.O.K.L.E.S.

2004 | 3 Pictures 

Eine Skulpturengruppe von acht geschnitzten Holzschwertern, die ich mit in den Griff geritzten Buchstaben. Die ich im Grundklassenjahr an der HBK angefertigt und über meinem Arbeitsplatz gehangen haben.

Axt

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