Jürgen Trautwein
 blog

Reframing the realm of ideas outside the grid.
Shortcuts to selected projects and reviews:		  


Pink(in)sanity a NIESATT-remix project/site specific installation
NIESATT a drawing and multimedia hybridization project. NIESATT is a neologism consistent of two German words, nie (never) and satt (full, enough, satisfied). If NIESATT is read backwards and the double T substituted with a D it reads Dasein (being in this world or exercising being). NIESATT explores selected drawings and their digital transformations in a process of constantly seeking new directions. The drawings I select to transform are not sealed inside the realms of aesthetics and theory but refer to the life around us. They reveal visions of the human drama on the battlefield of reality in our commercialized and machine dependent world. NIESATT are emotional realistic, thought- provoking drawings, which challenge the viewer to question his own behavior under the burden of the technocratic machine, and spread motivation to fill out the sterile emptiness with his own imagination... continue

 


 

Hölderlin im Wind site specific outdoor installation - a tribute to Dionysus project
Hölderlin im Wind are rooftop installations in downtown San Francisco. They are tributes to the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. The project uses fragments of the poem Brot und Wein - an elegy of the passing of ancient Greece - printed on letter-size sheets of paper attached to a fishing line and installed on the rooftop of the building where my studio is located. The sheets wither over time and are taken by the wind after all. The project explores poetry as a time based art form and is part of the evolving project “art in odd places”- “… wo brichts, allgegenwärtigen Glücks voll donnernd aus heiterer Luft über die Augen herein?
 Vater Äther! so riefs und flog von Zunge zu Zunge Tausendfach, es ertrug keiner das Leben allein;…“

 
 
Body Wraps desert performance
Body wraps are embodied paintings, a painting reverse project, where I bring canvas and body to nature, not body and nature on-to canvas. This project is a series of brief posing performances for tourists, scorpions and rattlesnakes, but manly for the camera. Body wraps are ephemeral environmental interferences exploring body in space. These posing performances are tributes to Landscape art in general and specifically to be seen as “dried-up” interpretations of “wanderer in the sea of fog’ by Caspar David Friedrich.
 
Office for unsolvable problems site specific installation, a jenseits von gut und böse project.
O4up  questions the "office" system in general, the concept of office-space and it's use of paper, digital equipment and personal and corporate power structures. O4up is an attempt to visualize the irrelevance of profit maximization, which only results in environmental and personal exploitation. Furthermore O4up explores the insane concept of accumulation, capitalization, connectivity and the idea of the unsolvable.
 
noise_pix_bombs / jtwine re-twined html-game/net-art project
 click your way into infinite repetitions of the same, an always the Same-Game SPIEL ohne ZIEL project. n_p_b is a remix, consisting of various former jtwine net art projects re-contextualized and re-twined. This is a net based anti war, experimental, virtual interactive sound-image-composition pseudo game. The n_p_b project questions repetitious perception of destruction with the option of minute modifications, while repeating the same actions...
 

 
 
Out of my mind selected drawings
 My drawings are raw thoughts, sparse, line-based and broken down to its essential elements of positive and negative spaces, defined by markings or non-markings, always challenged to practice the art of omission, while revealing the complexities of being. Drawing is to me like breathing out the folly of humanity. In a process following my subconscious I’m reflecting on the funnily bizarre, cruel and ignorant doings, machinations and shenanigans of our species the ultimate species of super-bugs "homostridia difficiles" in all their multitudinous forms of predator-prey relationships.
 
ONSPEED from slow motion to subliminal net-art/data-visualization
ONSPEED is a net based info-deformation project revealing the perpetual reoccurrence of the same. ONSPEED is an animated version of one year’s repetitious activity within the evolving minimal tweet-drawing project jtwinedotcom on twitter, using twitter’s 140 character limitations, showing information as an endless flow of impermanence. ONSPEED reflects on the seemingly endless “news” output on twitter, by reducing information into black squares and blank spaces, a sort of binary news data visualization, resulting in addition and subtraction patterns of these two elements. ONSPEED is visually examining the ephemeral nature of information and reduces the twitter-timeline to an esthetic flow of patterns.
 
ZERO1ZERO Walks net-art/ experimental mini documentaries
Notes from the abyss, or sketches of my daily walks through a tough neighborhood010 walks are net based tributes to the disenfranchised, the poor and all those living on the edge of society. 010-walks are experimental, reductive, low resolution video mini documentaries of San Francisco's seedy neighborhood the Tenderloin, an area of poverty, drug addiction, mental disorder and a very high density of homelessness.
 
Rienetrouge 4 by 7, or flowers for my honey  net-art/sound-art
is an interactive hover & click image-sound in motion web piece in three variations, based on windows xp program soundfiles modifications. Rienetrouge 4 by 7 are dadafied love poems in 4 languages. Depending on how fast one mouses over, or clicks on the words, one can create his own love-noise-motion-scape.
 
space(d)out (a long way from home) net-art/sound-art
 is an imaginary web-based interactive outerspace image in motion sound project. A project that explores the idea of being lost in infinite space. The project questions identity, alienation, seperation, distance, lostness and loneliness.
 
Soundpool net-art/sound-art
7 interactive layers of nature and noise sounds. A mp3 sound subtraction and addition game, consisting of 4 nature layers and three noise layers. It goes like this all go, or 1, 2, 3 go 4 stop 5 stop 6, 7 go, or 1 go 2 stop 3 stop 4 stop 5 stop 6 stop 7 go, or 1 go 2 go 3 stop 4 stop 5stop 6 stop 7 stop, or....
 
RWB - who's afraid of red, white and blue net-art/sound-art/presidential election sound game
RWB is a NIESATT of liberté, egalité and fraternité net art project. This piece is a simple html game. It's not necessarily funny, it's only an interactive noise composer in red, white and blue, but maybe for some it's some entertaining fun besides the finals of the american presidental elections of 2008 and all the elections that follow.

 
 
Words for nothing (the fedup elegy) net-art
Words for nothing or the fed up elegy is an interactive net art piece questioning who we are, what we do and what we are good for. This project explores the meaning of words voiced by man-mammals and fe-mammals the ultimate, limitless supra animals, who are constantly reflecting on their environment in a perpetual process of hopeless, destructive change.
 

The sleep of reason site specific installation
Trautwein takes what he finds in the cheap consumer world, and transforms it, with sometimes only minimal formative interferences, into aesthetic statements about the conditions of our present. "I shop therefore I am" determined by Barbara Kruger 1987 in a photo work as a provocative allusion on Rene Descartes basic idea "cogito ergo sum": I think, therefore I am. Trautwein doesn't come along that categorically. In his work the different ways of life pass into each other - certainly not without breaks and by any means not in such a way, that it would be without something to think about.

Michael Huebel
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NIESATT parallel worlds net-art
In NIESATT, the notion of ‘parallel worlds’ translates into dividing every inch of the screen into slithers of multi-layered, scrolling, exploding, animated, visual, wordy, flash, gifs; the website seems unlimited and unbound by time and space constraints. One can get lost in it – but never feel at a dead end for all the links, tunnel and merge into the world of JTwine.

Darshana Vora
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Homo digitalis will never be full  site specific installation
 The biographer and writer on art Karel van Mander wrote, that Pieter Breugel, the great Dutch andscape painter, when crossing the Alps sucked up the impressions of the mountains on hisjourney to Italy and literally spit them out, when he returned from his trip.
It is similar with Jurgen Trautwein’s computer art, only that he doesn't suck up alpine landscapes,but various contemporary issues. He absorbs themes like depersonalization, ecological collapse,obsessions with beauty and violence, to spit them out again, after being digitally manipulated,in a socially critical and ironic manner.

Claudia Schuler
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