sequence-non /art.for.context.collapse

In the contemporary art scenario, outstanding artists have often played around with plausibly radicalized versions of reality. More scaring than degenerate fantasies, more real than reality, these visions of a future that is uncertain by definition are constructed using the medium of choice. UBERMORGEN.COM are masters of sculpting provocative mediated environments. their approach to contemporaneity often gives a form to concrete hallucinations of a distorted present and traces manifest social and political degenerations through further plausible stages of their evolution.

…As Cornelia Sollfrank points out in her text, UBERMORGEN.COM’s viral signature hasworks that blasted massive craters of uncertainty and disorientation into survived inside the ‘bourgeois art world’ in association with an impressive list of artworks that speaks for itself. Another important and distinctive mark of this unique couple is that their contradictions are public, open and strangely coherent. For example, they provocatively state that “the individual doesn’t count,” in open defiance of the classic equation ‘artist = genius’. Yet it is nonetheless the heritage of Bernhard’s personal experi- ences from his etoy days that is always invisibly present, and this and his psychological complexity (including the occasional crisis) determine his input in the group’s actions. He contextualizes this somewhat precarious personal condition in a pop cultural setting that includes related past experiences and emotions derived from videogames of the eighties, from an interpretation of the screen as an infinite space and from William Gibson’s concept of ‘collective hallucination’. His use of recreational drugs in the past and of medicinal ones now (that makes him a sort of ‘living cyborg’ in the Domenico Quaranta perspective) seems to have made him more determined to enter the territory of ephemeral media and, assisted by Liz, to channel his raw energy into artistic expression, even with the ‘cold precision’ noted by Nebojsa Milikic…

…The striking result is a series of highly controversial works that blasted massive craters of uncertainty and disorientation into the landscape of the media of interest to society and succeeded in this more effectively than would have been possible using ‘classic’ political tactics. Among them, the ‘[f]original’ (forged original) concept stands out,
fake documents pretending to be authentic or, as Jacob Lillemose puts it, “information (that) can be neither confirmed nor repudiated.” If massively applied, [f]originals could disrupt an entire bureaucratic system, but they are elegantly paraded by their authors as “pixel on a screen, ink on paper”. … the nature of their work, as is rightly noted
by Florian Cramer, is intrinsically dystopian. Corporative methods and propaganda are systematically adopted and deconstructed – but there’s no redeeming light on the horizon. On the contrary, as you stand vis-à-vis an UBERMORGEN.COM installation, dark humour spreads like an invisible gas and you cannot avoid inhaling it while experiencing the artwork. … “they use new media technology, but their main medium is language”, noted Raffael Dörig. So their objects are never ‘alien’; they are never surreal or heading off into some dream scenario. Instead they are ‘real’ – or all too real – and succeed in destabilizing any concept of ‘reality’ we may already have had in mind. In fact most of UBERMORGEN.COM’s installations show something plausible, tangible and perfectly (dys)func- tional, which has apparently been (unlawfully) appropriated from a future that is just around the corner. these objects are not really prototypes,
but complex abstractions that seem to have arrived ahead of their time in their social and/or economic setting. UBERMORGEN.COM’s aesthetic excesses are meant to be read between the lines. As Marina Grzinic points out: “In such an antagonistic situation, categories such as the ethical, tragedy, the human, reality and space are almost outdated elements.” …

…UBERMORGEN.COM are in fact constantly playing with a variable timeline, changing points of reference, orientation and cultural syntax at will, tele-porting the viewer to extremely fascinating, ephemeral reality zones that around with plausibly radicalized versions of reality. More scaring than degenerate fantasies, more real than reality, these visions of a future that is uncertain by definition are constructed using the medium of choice. UBERMORGEN.COM are masters of sculpting provocative mediated environments. their approach to contemporaneity often gives a form to concrete hallucinations of a distorted present and traces manifest social and political degenerations through further plausible stages of their evolution. the concept of ‘reality’ seen through UBERMORGEN.COM eyes is both threatening and fascinating. It is distorted, but only to an extent that could become established fact within a couple of days…