Preview

Bjørn Melhus: Screensavers

Interactive Multimedia Installation on LED Screens

From 13 November 2008 through 22 April 2009

Superheroes on LED Stelae

Screensavers is the name the internationally acclaimed media artist Bjørn Melhus has given his digital clones, which will populate the SEVEN SCREENS in front of the OSRAM Haus in the coming months. With his sound reactive computer animations, whose images and texts are generated from an actual radio program, the artist renders the everyday language of mass media visible.

This art project marks OSRAM’s first cooperative effort with the information radio station B5 aktuell, which will provide the material for the art installation on the seven LED stelae situated along the Mittlerer Ring in Munich. With the help of sound and speech recognition software, the artist will generate image and text sequences in real time from the current program of the information radio station B5 aktuell.

Bjørn Melhus thinks far into the future with regard to both artistic contexts as well as technological concepts. The visual program sequences for Screensavers were developed and created together with specialized programmers. By means of a software program, the words spoken on the radio are partially transformed into image and text sequences that then appear on the stelae with only minimal delay. In the case of a few predetermined key words - such as “art,” “catastrophe” or “traffic jam” - additional image and text sequences that provide visual comments on the spoken words are triggered. Comic book heroes, the Screensavers, appear on the SEVEN SCREENS during the brief presentation breaks.

The artist‘s Screensavers is a response to the present comeback of superheroes in the mass media, a phenomenon that recurs in periods of general uncertainty. In doing this the connection between the self-embodied comic heroes, created by Bjørn Melhus in the Screensavers, and the latest news reports creates an interplay made up of facts and fiction. The art project itself thus becomes a reflection of the media world today.

For his interactive video installation Screensavers Bjørn Melhus uses acoustic material in real time as the basis for the projection on the SEVEN SCREENS. Although the acoustic level serves as the Screensavers' starting point, it is not a necessary condition for the work‘s reception since the reduction of messages to key words creates new contexts and associations on the LED stelae. With his most recent work the artist reacts to the installation‘s site. The Mittlerer Ring in Munich is a very busy road and approximately 90,000 automobiles pass by the light stelae each day and with them a great many viewers, whose common public space is not a visible but audible one – the radio. If television connects millions of living rooms with each other, then it follows that the mass media specific to driving is the radio. This thought serves as his starting point when Bjørn Melhus makes the radio the basis of his media reflecting, critical and artistic work, the Screensavers.

Bjørn Melhus lives in a media-driven culture, as an analyst, protagonist and – like us all – a consumer. In his work, unlike other artists, he deals with the stocktaking of media-cultural creations, such as film and television, and thereby scrutinizes the reciprocal relationships between the individual, the masses and the medium. A recurring motif is the double (Superhero), the reproduced individual who is always embodied by the artist himself. Like an archeologist, Melhus digs up finds from the media and cultural history of the 20th and 21st centuries in order to address the question of human identity in the context of a completely media-driven western culture.

As a media partner, B5 aktuell reminds its listeners regularly about the art installation on the SEVEN SCREENS with announcements between news pieces.

Ivo Wessel, Rainer Kohlberger and Mike Orthwein developed and made the visual realization of the project possible.

Bjørn Melhus

Bjørn Melhus was born in 1966 in Kirchheim/Teck. As a child of a generation that was strongly influenced by television, his works revolve around the mechanisms and formats of this mass media. Bjørn Melhus studied creative art from 1988 to1997 at the HBK in Braunschweig. He has received a number of scholarships, including ones from the DAAD at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles and from the state of Niedersachsen at the ISCP in New York. His works have been honored with numerous awards, including the Marler Video Art Prize, a prize from Sprengel Museum in Hannover and the HAP Grieshaber Prize. He has had solo and group shows in New York, Denver, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, Kyoto, Moscow, Milan, Madrid, Zürich, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Munich. Bjørn Melhus has been a professor of fine arts and virtual realities since 2003 at the Kassel Art Academy. He lives and works in Berlin.