LSM David Szauder

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MOMENTUM AiR

David Szauder

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STUDIO RESIDENCY

1 March – 27 September 2020

Light Space Modulator

In Homage to Moholy-Nagy

5 June – 27 September 2020

Open Studio with the Artist every Friday at 14:00 – 18:00

And during Berlin Art Week:
9 June – 13 September 2020 at 14:00 – 18:00

@ MOMENTUM

Kunstquartier Bethanien
Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin

David Szauder – Artist Bio

Media artist David Szauder (b. 1976 in Hungary) studied Art History at the Eötvös Loránd University and Intermedia at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts in Budapest, and completed a Masters Fellowship at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture at the Aalto University in Helsinki. From 2009 to 2014 he worked as the curator at the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin (.CHB). David Szauder is a visiting lecturer at the Film Academy, Potsdam, in addition to leading workshops on interactive media in Berlin and Budapest since 2010. Since 2019, he is the New Media Advisor for the Artistic Director of the VEB 2023 European Capital of Culture.

David Szauder has participated in a variety of international projects as artist and curator. In cooperation with MOMENTUM, previous projects include:
“Art Nomads: Made in the Emirates” at Studio 1, Kunstquartier Bethanien (Berlin, 2016);“Ganz Grosses Kino” KIK Eight at Kino International (Berlin, 2016); MOMENTUM InsideOut: Amir Fattal, “Atara” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2015); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “A Time for Dreams” & “Budapest Sketch”(Berlin Art Week, 2014); “PANDAMONIUM Preview // INTERPIXEL: Media Art from Shanghai and Budapest” (Berlin Gallery Weekend, 2014); “INTERSECTION”: Film and Video Art Panel Discussion for Berlinale (Berlin Film Festival, 2014); “THRESHOLDS”: Performance, Exhibition, Discussion (.CHB, Berlin Art Week, 2013); “THRESHOLDS” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013-2014); MOMENTUM InsideOut: “Mass & Mess” (TRAFO Center for Contemporary Art, Stettin, Poland, 2013).

About Light Space Modulator

Taking as his inspiration the eponymous sculpture by one of the founding fathers of the Bauhaus, Moholy-Nagy, David Szauder has re-created his own large-scale 3.5m rendition of this iconic work as a kinetic light and sound sculpture for public space. First premiered in Korea, MOMENTUM brought Szauder’s Light Space Modulator to Berlin for the 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus in 2019. Initially installed at the historic Villa Erxleben, Light Space Modulator now moves to the MOMENTUM gallery to serve as a starting point for David Szauder’s visual experiments and re-interpretations of Moholy-Nagy’s work.

Over the course of six months, David Szauder continues to develop his translation of Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas into a multi-mediated interactive installation; creating two videos and a soundscape algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of the sculpture: Light Space Materia and Kinetic Study no. 68. In addition, Szauder experiments with adding a virtual component to enable the Moholy Cloud, designed to translate the ambient data recorded by sensors on the sculpture into visual and auditory forms.

Every day throughout the course of the Studio Residency, Szauder completes a Digital Sketch, which he publishes on social media. A selection of these works has been assembled into a series of video animations acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection.

Within the limits of the COVID-19 restrictions, this work-in-progress is punctuated with Open Studio presentations and Artist Talks throughout the course of David Szauder’s Studio Residency.

The original Moholy-Nagy work (151.1 × 69.9 × 69.9 cm), one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage (Light Space Modulator) holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture. Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world. He presented Light Prop at a 1930 exhibition of German design as a mechanism for generating “special lighting and motion effects” on a stage. The rotating construction produces a startling array of visual effects when its moving and reflective surfaces interact with the beam of light. The sculpture became the subject of numerous photographs as well as Moholy’s abstract film Lightplay: Black, White, Gray (1930). Over the years the artist and later the museums made alterations to the sculpture to keep it in working order. It is still operational today.
– [citation from Harvard Art Museums, holding the original Light Space Modulator in the Harvard Museum Collection]

The Original: Moholy-Nagy’s Light Space Modulator

Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM

ARTIST STATEMENT

One of the greatest Hungarian innovations, and one of the earliest electrically powered kinetic sculptures, Light Prop for an Electric Stage holds a central place in the history of modern sculpture.

Representing the culmination of Moholy-Nagy’s experimentation at the Bauhaus, it incorporates his interest in technology, new materials, and, above all, light. Moholy sought to revolutionize human perception and thereby enable society to better apprehend the modern technological world.

Light Prop for an Electric Stage, as Moholy-Nagy referred to it, not only pushes the temporal dimension of art but expands its spatial dimensions into the entire environment, including the viewer, who becomes a surface onto which light is reflected.

It embodies Moholy-Nagy’s goal of pushing art beyond static forms and introducing kinetic elements, in which the volume relationships are virtual ones, i.e., resulting mainly from the actual movement of the contours, rings, rods, and other objects.

To the three dimensions of volume, a fourth: movement – in other words, time – is added.

Moholy’s masterpiece is not just a piece of art, it is the perfect combination of science, art, and innovation.

To Moholy-Nagy’s original design, David Szauder adds a fifth dimension: the virtual.

Szauder’s vision for the Moholy Cloud expands the kinetic interactivity of the sculpture into the realm of connectivity in virtual space. Every moving part of the sculpture contains a sensor engaging with its environment, and through a wireless connection, all the acquired data is visualised to create a virtual Light Space Modulator.

[David Szauder]

ADDITIONAL WORKS CREATED DURING THE STUDIO RESIDENCY

LIGHT SPACE MATERIA

2020, Video, 8 min 27 sec

Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection

Translating Moholy-Nagy’s seminal ideas for the Bauhaus into a digital context, David Szauder’s large-scale kinetic light and sound sculpture Light Space Modulator (2020) serves as the basis for his film Light Space Materia in addition to a series of over 100 videos, digital animations, and soundscapes algorithmically derived from the motion and sound of his sculpture. David Szauder’s analysis of the Bauhaus-related kinetics of the original piece focuses on the fundamental question of how modern technology could change the formal expression of movement. The Bauhaus always held an important pioneering position in the relationship of art to technology. For this reason, this characteristic always formed an essential basic notion of Szauder’s work and led him to choose computer code when creating the animations. The code contributed to a better understanding of the compositional methods and movements and opened a new door for the perception of the 3-dimensional kinetic world. As the last step, a soundscape was derived from the ambient sound and kinetic movement of Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture using algorithms based on motion analysis. This soundscape accompanies Szauder’s film Light Space Materia, which commingles found footage related to the seminal ideas of the Bauhaus with digital 3D animations made by the artist to foreground the haptic qualities of materiality of the image.

Works from the Digital Sketches Series:

In his ongoing series of Video Sketches, David Szauder hand draws animated collages incorporating family photos and found footage. In the artist’s words, “They are kinds of kinetic systems, structures, moving like the ‘perpetuum mobile’. In my case, the perpetuum mobile is the metaphor of the continually changing inner world of mine. There are a good number of nodes which are connected like impossible machines, and the movements of these nodes create an impossible hierarchy or dominations between the elements of the structure. Occasionally the system strives for completion, but these operations are just alibis, the real aim is to keep the movement endless, the structure closed and the hierarchy sustainable. Easy. Like these sketches.” The works created during Szauder’s Studio Residency and shown here are all related to his analysis of the Bauhaus focus on art and technology which led him to use computer code when creating the animations.

KINETIC STUDY no. 68

2020, Video Animation, 4 min 2 sec

Created by David Szauder for the exhibition Light Space Modulator at MOMENTUM, and subsequently acquired by the MOMENTUM Collection

Kinetic Study no. 68 is based on the structure of David Szauder’s Light Space Modulator sculpture. Using algorithms to translate the motion and sound of the sculpture into a 2-dimensional video animation, Szauder breaks down this work into four stages: The Skeleton (Line Art), Colours, Textures, and Collage.