Leonardo

Hofstetter Kurt: Ich schaue in den Himmel um mich zu erden ("I look up to the sky to ground myself"), edited by Philipp Konzett, is a massive and intriguing monograph exploring the work of the Vienna-based media art pioneer Hofstetter Kurt. Part theoretical examination, part poetic exploration, it is dense, lyrical and provocative. At exactly 300 pages, and with hundreds of color photographs in addition to numerous black and white images and diagrams, it is a philosophical and technical treatise masquerading as an attractive coffee [End Page 198] table book. The text, in both German and English, includes a lengthy set of descriptive and analytical essays, heavily illustrated and annotated, by Hofstetter's longtime creative collaborator, the artist and art historian Barbara Doser. A critical text by the prominent curator and art theorist Bazon Brock is also included. Together, these place Hofstetter's work in historical context.

Hofstetter, as Philipp Konzett notes in his foreword, "can boast an internationally recognized body of artistic work, for which he was awarded the Austrian Art Prize for Media Art, a national prize of the Republic of Austria, in 2020." Among his first works to gain wide recognition was an early permanent public video computer art installation, Planet of the Commuters with the Three TimeMoons , installed at the Wien Mitte train station in Vienna in 1993, where it remains operational today. Konzett aptly explains that the subject matter of this work, and indeed of all of Hofstetter's subsequent work, "is time and space, parallelism and circulation, that Hofstetter approaches in a manner which is at once inquisitive, playful and scientifically precise."

Hofstetter's work spans many kinds of media and output while remaining remarkably consistent and unified. The book clarifies its powerfully conceptual basis while evoking its quiet, contemplative and cerebral nature. While availing himself of any advanced technology that might be applicable, Hofstetter, as we can see, studiously avoids technological fetish or trendy contemporaneity in his artistic language. The result is a sense of timelessness.

Ich schaue in den Himmel um mich zu erden contains new creative content in the form of a 160-page color image series by Hofstetter titled Pause with your Mouth Open: X-stills—Moments in the Simultaneous Light of Dusk and Dawn on Earth. This project may serve as a good illustration of the conceptual continuity that underlies Hofstetter's work as a whole. The images in the series are derived from live video streams of the eastern sky captured by a network of twelve cameras called Time Eyes, which Hofstetter placed equidistantly around the globe along the northern Tropic of Capricorn as key elements in his Sunpendulum project, whose implementation began in 1998. In conjunction, Hofstetter has developed a series of interactive video terminals called fACING tIME, installed primarily at universities hosting Time Eye cameras, which simultaneously display user-selectable sky images from opposite sides of the earth, as well as a number of related video installations that display what he terms "X-tense Images"—extended imagery. These utilize image luminance key masks to parametrically blend the image streams from opposite sides of the earth. Within the entire X-tense image series, these key mask images are of great variety and provenance, including human lips, legs, neck, breasts and buttocks, in addition to the sun, moons and other imagery. The X-stills series in the book utilizes a subset of the X-tense images.

As real time streaming images, the Sunpendulum and X-tense images provide a very slow and calming experience, literally at the perceived speed of the rotation of the earth, and the sense of being present in two places at once. These are ambient media artworks, intended to be continually operational and visible in public spaces, gradually...