Cerith Wyn Evans, “The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here…”

(Kunsthaus Graz Remix, 2005), in collaboration with Luis Augusto Pecora Marques Pinto (sound production) and Mathias Gmahl (image production)
Kunsthaus Graz, BIX Media Façade
Opening: Friday, November 4th, 2005, at 8 pm
November 5th, 2005 – February 4th, 2006
Curator: Adam Budak
www.bix.at

With “The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here…” by Cerith Wyn Evans, Kunsthaus Graz launches a new project for its unique exhibition surface – BIX Media Façade.
The BIX concept was initiated and developed by the Berlin based architects realities: united, and it operates as a matrix of 930 fluorescent lamps integrated into the eastern Plexiglas façade of the Kunsthaus Graz, an outstanding example of biomorphic architecture, conceived by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. Through the possibility to individually adjust the lamps’ brightness at an infinite variability with 20 frames/second images, films and animations can be displayed. The BIX media installation and the Kunsthaus’ architecture share a strong symbiotic relationship. The façade as a display extends the communication range of the Kunsthaus, complementing its programmatically formulated communicative purpose. In an abstract and mediated form the media façade transmits the internal processes of the Kunsthaus out into the public.
“The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here…” (Kunsthaus Graz Remix, 2005) by Cerith Wyn Evans is yet another attempt at mapping out the potentiality of BIX Media Façade as a particular site of spectacle within the performative architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz. Inspired by a novel “The Place of Dead Roads” by William Burroughs, in which the protagonists understand their reality to be artifice and in collaboration with Luis Augusto Pecora Marques Pinto, Sao Paulo-based musician and d.j., this complex project combines literary reference with a polyphonic musical score and it results in a beyond-architectural, sophisticated edifice of sound and light, as well as an image and a text.
“The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here…” enters urban space as both an imaginary projection and a real challenge for perceptive agencies. As Mathias Gmahl, Evans’ collaborator responsible for software and image production, explains, “the software combines analysis and synthesis and focuses on our ability to perceive pattern and make connections, to see parts in relation to the whole. It shows patterns of optic flow, images created using mathematical expressions of the golden proportion and cellular automata. The program is similar to an instrument, which is performed live and recorded in real-time to produce the final animation”.
At the occasion of this project, the DVD “The Sky Is Thin As Paper Here…” (Kunsthaus Graz Remix, 2005) has been produced with the software and a soundtrack as well as with an essay by Martin Prinzhorn and a conversation with Cerith Wyn Evans by Adam Budak.