Novocene

Interactive Mixed Reality Installation
Quest 3 MR headset and analog tree sculpture  |  5 x 5 m


Novocene is a mixed reality experience that unfolds an interactive narrative about the development of humanity in the Anthropocene, the age dominated and shaped by humans. It also deals with resource consumption and environmental destruction in the present and contrasts this with a utopian vision of the future.

After a few leaps in time, even the climate crisis becomes tangible in its ultimate consequence when the actual environment sinks into a virtually rising sea level. Until then, the story takes an interested and critical look at the role of technology and AI in solving the ultimate challenge of humanity and also questions the suitability of the immersive medium of video games to tell us about it.

At first, a pair of mixed reality glasses lies inconspicuously on a tree stump in the exhibition space. The felled tree is an improvised construction made from temporary materials such as wood, cardboard and plastic. Viewed through the headset, it unexpectedly sprouts young, virtual shoots and branches and grows to new life. As the plot unfolds around this tree sculpture, the viewer can construct a monument for an alternative future from the artefacts and totems of a proverbially lost civilization.


The interactive experience thematizes human impact on nature and inevitably leads to the question: Is it even possible to deal artistically and aesthetically with something as colossal as the climate crisis and its destructive consequences? How can the narrative of the possible end of all narratives succeed? Is it possible to strike a fine balance, hopefully somewhere between instruction and fatalism on the one hand and naïve ignorance and faith in technology on the other? Critical voices from the field of neuroscience tend to deny that humanity, in its subjective constitution, is capable of processing a challenge of such complexity and temporal horizon at all. Another prominent thesis is based on the imprint of the evolutionary pressure to adapt. According to this theory, egoism steeled by competition thwarts collective, global action. Consequently, the hope remains that we will develop the ability for this action as soon as possible.

First, however, the virtual, essayistic journey through time takes its recipients back to the untouched natural state of the Holocene, shortly before humans began to exert their global influence. The audiovisual excursion goes on to describe the onset of the soon unbridled exploitation and burning of natural resources. The title Novocene is a homage to the environmental philosopher James Lovelock, who as a scientist was also involved in the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer. He saw the aforementioned human dilemma being solved in a future age of hyperintelligence, which he outlined in his popular science book Novacene (2019). | Read more…

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.

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

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.

| Read more…

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.

| 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.


| Read more…

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…

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…

Off, Over and Out

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

Objective

Interactive video installation | VR, head tracking
0,6 x 0,6 x 2 m  |  2015 
| Read more…

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…

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.


| Read more…

Receivers


Printed cardboard, hardware, hot glue, paint  |  0.4 × 0.5 × 0.5 m  |  2012
| Read more…

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…