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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.
R111 - the transformation of digital information to analog matter
Michael Saup,
Supreme Particles
Original: R111 - Bild 1 | 2480 * 3508px | 24.9 MB
Original: R111 - Bild 3 | 3189 * 2154px | 19.7 MB
Original: R111 - Bild 4 | 3195 * 2154px | 19.7 MB
Original: R111 - Bild 6 | 2780 * 2164px | 34.5 MB
Original: R111 - Bild 7 | 3207 * 2129px | 19.6 MB
1666, Gottfried Leibniz published the book „Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria“. In this work he aimed to reduce all reasoning and discovery to a combination of basic elements such as numbers, letters, sounds and colors. He then invented the binary system, the foundation of the digital universe, for him, 1 stood for god and 0 for the void.
1999, somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered on-line, it takes about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data, which is the equivalent of downloading 2 minutes of music from the internet.
Futurists have been promising us an information highway, not unit trains loaded with coal, fiber-optic cables, not 600-kilovolt power lines; but we re going to get both, all our fossil memory burns in order to fuel the digital fire.
„R111“ is an interactive installation. Energy-potentials are cannibalized off the internet and from the local movement of spectators in the physical space of „R111“. These energies are then transformed into various states of matter both physical and virtual and presented by the installation.
New media current tendencies are virtualizing reality. „R111“ on the contrary materializes virtuality: Choreographing particles of matter as though they were pixels.
Michael Saup (D) is a professor at the department of new media at the ZKM-HfG Karlsruhe. His work was presented at indifferent international events; amongst others at Siggraph, the Gallery of New Art New South Wales, the Venice Biennale and the ZKM’s Multimediale. His collaborators in the project R111 were: Louis Philippe Demers: magnetic robotic modules; Norman Muller: liquid modules; Pino Grzybowsky: sonic modules; Jan Totzek: tactile modules; Julie Méalin: linking modules; Daniel Verhülsdonk: tactile modules; Dominik Rinnhofer: tracking modules; Stefan Preuß: virtual modules; Julia Herzog: texture animations.