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Themesicon: navigation pathAesthetics of the Digitalicon: navigation pathEndo-Aesthetics
 
Beobachtung der Beobachtung: Unbestimmtheit (Weibel, Peter), 1973Imaginäre Wasserskulptur (Weibel, Peter), 1971Der Traum vom gleichen Bewußt-Sein aller (Weibel, Peter), 1979
 
 
 

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interactivity (the role of the observer in the system), and the interface (world-understanding as a question of the interface). [18] All this characterizes endoaesthetics. Endo-aesthetic criteria enable a comprehensive analysis of interactive art in which the audience participates in the system which it observes and with which it interacts, and whose digital processes and instruments are considered to be system-inherent. With a series of works from 1977 onward, Peter Weibel investigated the relativity of an observer-dependent world and the possibilities resulting in reference to internal observers, to the world as interface, and to the relationship between real and virtual spaces. His video installation «Inverse Space» of 1977 simulates the model of an artificial world which, although set up in a real space, is paradoxically inaccessible to the observer. A camera concealed in a black box next to the monitor is shielded and lit up from within, with the result that it turns into an internal observer who takes a photo of the space set up on one side of the black box and relays this photo live to the monitor. [19]

The camera takes on the position of an internal observer in several of Weibel’s closed-circuit installations.

 

With «Observation of the Observation: Uncertainty» (1973), «Imaginary Water Sculpture» and «The Dream of Everyone Having the Same Consciousness» (both 1979), Weibel commenced a series of works starting from both—exo and endo—planes of reality. They allow the observer to move within a virtual space (observer-centered system) from both the outer and inner side of the interface. In the first installation a wide circle is formed by three cameras and three monitors, each connected with one of the three cameras placed on circles drawn on the floor. When the observer is standing in the inner ring, he sees on the monitor what the camera behind him is recording: his rear view. The observer moves within a virtual space that is created not by himself, as an external observer, but by the internal observer, the camera. «In order to be able to see himself from the front, the viewer must conform to the laws of the interface and become himself a co-variant […]. In this realtime installation the viewer is put in the picture, but the price he pays is co-variance.» [20] Using the possibilities opened up by new technologies, Weibel in the 1990s commenced a series of works in which the observer interacts in real time with virtual

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