AUGMENTED REALITY:
Since 2021, Michaela Konrad has been exploring the artistic possibilities of augmented reality. For her, AR is an extension and a supplement – but not a replacement – of analog artworks in digital space. By adding sound and animation, the artwork is brought to life and the audience is invited to engage more deeply with the underlying thoughts of the piece. The extension to the digital plane in augmented reality is a logical consequence of the subject matter of her works, which often revolve around the genre of science fiction.
ANIMATIONS:
MOONBOUND – Looking back to Earth
On February 18, 2021, the Nasa rover Perseverance landed on Mars, one of several
successful expeditions to the red planet in recent decades. Our expectations of gaining in-depth scientific knowledge are high and will likely be met. We may even find out that there was life on Mars. But something is still missing: no human being has landed on Mars and can tell us what it feels like to have been there.
Apart from the astronauts and cosmonauts at the International Space Station in near earth orbit, we have to go back to the late 1960s and early 1970s to find out what
happens to the mind of a person who travels to a distant celestial body and looks back
at earth. To date, only twenty-four men have had this extraordinary experience. They saw the earth as a whole – as a small, blue and fragile sphere, lost in a pitch-black universe. And this change of perspective also led to a change in consciousness.
These twenty-four men remembered the technically and physically challenging Apollo
training program that did not prepare them for the psychological shock triggered
by this dramatic change of perspective. After their adventure, they reported strange
sensations, as if the earth were a living being. They described seeing an earth without
national borders. That these boundaries only existed in people‘s minds. And they told of the profound realisation that we are all one. That we have to preserve our environment.
CAN THIS BE?, Video, 2018
The animation to the project CAN THIS BE TOMORROW?
ON THE BEACH, 2013/2015, animation, a tribute to Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest artists of the last century, was also a huge fan
of comics. As a recipient in the 1940s, he regularly exchanged the contents of his wastebasket for comics from the USA. And he depicted many figures with a humorous comic character. But he never fully committed to the medium.
The only thing I regret in my life is that I never drew a comic. Pablo Picasso
Picasso‘s On the Beach, his 1937 Bathers with a Toy Boat, with all its sexual innuendos
becomes the starting point for a comic animation. It shows a voyeur trying to get
close to two naked women on the beach with the help of a toy boat. Michaela Konrad
establishes this scenery and adds more of Picasso‘s figures. For example, a pointed,
female figure, borrowed from a painting that can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum
in New York, or two bathing women whose bodies have special characteristics: they
have two faces, one real face and a second – depicted using breasts, navel and
genitalia …
In this way, well-known and less well-known works of Picasso are literally brought to
life and together tell a charming story about people‘s hunt for love and the object of
their desire.
In ON THE BEACH – a homage to Pablo Picasso – Michaela Konrad is responsible for
the story, the drawings and the animation, Eugen Neacsu for the animation and the
effects and Octavian Horvath for the sound design.
MEMORIES OF NOW
MEMORIES OF NOW is the result of the encounter between the graphic platform of
the SPACELOVE cycle by Michaela Konrad and the sound structures conceived by
Daniel Dorobantu. For the opening of her solo exhibition COMIC IMPACTS ART at the Art Museum Timisoara, Michaela Konrad selected Daniel Dorobantu and Eugen
Neacsu alias VJ Burger for the live performance from a number of Romanian electronic musicians. Daniel Dorobantu composed the track SPACELOVE specifically for this
occasion. From this first collaboration, the idea of a joint multimedia project developed, which premiered in spring 2010 as part of the Nextcomic Festival at the Deep Space of the Ars Electronica Center. MEMORIES OF NOW is an audio-visual creation designed to be perceived by the viewer as an autonomous installation, as a live performance, as an animation or anywher between these areas. It generates multi-channel, audio-visual elements that are interpreted as comic stories by the audience – aided by the need of the human brain to create context. Utilising generative techniques and real-time interventions, MEMORIES OF NOW becomes a constantly changing experience. The installation creates a multi-layered comic story that goes far beyond the linear narrative common in storytelling, inviting viewers to create their own version of the story.
