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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Bilderbuch für Ernst Will - A Euro Rebus
Peter Callas
Original: Bilderbuch für Ernst Will | 4429 * 3024px | 42.6 MB
Original: Bilderbuch für Ernst Will - A Euro Rebus | 3899 * 5531px | 61.7 MB
"Bilderbuch für Ernst Will" is an electronic rendering of a form of proto-televisual iconomania: the creation of haphazardly sourced private pictorial scrap books or bilderbiicher. Often intended for the surprise, delight and edification of grandchildren by grandparents, these books had the anagogical potential to become flamboyant transmogrifications of the detritus and sequestered oddments of the great age of print in the latter half of the 19th century.
Often the composition of a book might be re-entered at a later date by another hand with the inclusion of parachronic imagery. This type of pre-literate/post-verbal, and often intrapersonal, animus could lead to the creation of visual tropes of astonishing clarity. Such tropes beg the question of intention in the creation of 'meaning' and suggest the unravelling of a kind of rebus or enigmatic code which reveals the extremely private within the use of the plethora of mass-produced public images of distant scenes, events and people. The fortuitous collocation of views of towns, voyages of exploration, catastrophes, battle scenes and royal portraits become mantic in the deft hands of an expert snipper such as Hans Christian Andersen or the unknown creator of Ernst Will's picture book in war-time Vienna.
Technical Background
HW/SW: Quantel Harriet, Fairlight CVI+
Often the composition of a book might be re-entered at a later date by another hand with the inclusion of parachronic imagery. This type of pre-literate/post-verbal, and often intrapersonal, animus could lead to the creation of visual tropes of astonishing clarity. Such tropes beg the question of intention in the creation of 'meaning' and suggest the unravelling of a kind of rebus or enigmatic code which reveals the extremely private within the use of the plethora of mass-produced public images of distant scenes, events and people. The fortuitous collocation of views of towns, voyages of exploration, catastrophes, battle scenes and royal portraits become mantic in the deft hands of an expert snipper such as Hans Christian Andersen or the unknown creator of Ernst Will's picture book in war-time Vienna.
Technical Background
HW/SW: Quantel Harriet, Fairlight CVI+
Peter Callas (AU), born 1952, B.A. Honours, University of Sydney. 1975 – 78 Assistant film editor, sound editor, ABC Television, Sydney. 1980 Diploma in Art, Sydney College of the Arts. 1981 – 90 Lecturer for Video Art, City Art Institute, Sydney College of the Arts, NSW Institute of Technology, Sydney; School of Art, University of Tasmania, Hobart. 1986 Video Artist in Residence, Mrui Department Store, Tokyo.