The HfG Karlsruhe presents itself at "Media art is here" of the Karlsruhe UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts

Under the title "Media art is here", the UNESCO Creative City of Media Arts Karlsruhe will be showing media art for everyone in public spaces from August 15 to September 15, 2024.

The Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design will once again be represented this year with installations, exhibitions, videos, performances and interdisciplinary projects. Many of the works in the media art exhibition, which has been recurring annually parallel to the Schlossfestspiele since 2019, were created by members of the university and alumni, particularly from the Media Art department. This shows the great importance of the HfG as a place of discourse and training for media arts, which has not only been strongly connected to the city of Karlsruhe and its identity since its foundation in connection with the ZKM (Center for Art and Media), but also provides important impulses with current artistic debates.

Central themes that characterize this year's show and the works presented are the relationship between man and nature, reflection on gender roles and ecological issues.

In her interactive installation Natural Flow, consisting of over 50,000 pixels on 16 LED panels, media artist and designer Jihye Jang, a student of media art, visualizes the phenomena in nature that are influenced by humans. The work allows viewers to influence the wave movements through their presence.

Fungal Frequencies by SurrealLabor investigates the signal processing of mycelium and its translation into electronic networks. Part of the SurrealLabor collective is the interdisciplinary researcher and designer Julia Ihls, head of the Bio Design Lab at the HfG.

The installation Between Dreams and Reality by HfG student Anna-Lina Helsen shows a hybrid world of man and machine. It deals with the interplay between the conscious and the unconscious in an abstract way.

In Tides of Memories - The Other Time I Drowned, HfG academic staff Karolina Sobel and Helin Ulas in the Media Art department show the dreams of a fictional character from the perspective of water.

Marc Teuscher and Holger Förterer, both alumni of the HfG, also devote themselves to water. In the interior of the Kinemathek, their film project AGISTRILOGY on the PhonoLux machine depicts the beauty of the sea in various states, creating subtle, sensual, threatening and moving impressions.

In sleeping trees, Alex Besta and Tibor Pilz (HfG alumni) project bark structures onto the pillars of the city church and address the connection between architecture and nature.

In Screentime, the two media art alumni Hendrik Vogel and Kilian Kretschmer and their team address self-reflection through digital media and ask how digital technologies influence our self-image.

With New Fossils 3.0, Gerardo Nolasco-Rózsás, former HfG lecturer, together with Paris Díaz, uses an augmented reality installation to encourage reflection on the ecological footprint of the cities of Guadalajara and Karlsruhe.

The city of Karlsruhe also plays a central role in Whose Stories by academic staff member Vera Gärtner in the exhibition design and scenography program and HfG alumni Mio Kojima and Hanna Müller. In their work, they offer a feminist mapping of Karlsruhe. The work sheds light on the gender imbalance in the naming of streets and public spaces.

The show is on display until mid-September. Further information on the exhibition, the individual works and the respective opening and access times of the works can be found here: https://www.cityofmediaarts.de/de/events/media-art-is-here/