EMBEDDED ART – ART IN THE NAME OF SECURITY
Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz 4, Berlin-Mitte
Commissioned by the Akademie der Künste Berlin and BBM,
Lillevan creates an original piece for the exhibition in collaboration with media artist Zaji Chalem.
Vernissage 23-Jan-2009 / 7pm
Exhibition runs: 24-Jan to 22-Mar 2009 / Tue-Fri / 11am – 8pm
Every Friday at 8pm: ‘Homeland Security Club’
Berliner Zeitung 24th Jan.
EMBEDDED ART looks at the threats to unrestricted public life following the 9/11 attacks and the attacks in Madrid, Moscow and London.
Security issues in the 21st century have an impact on the day-to-day life of millions of people. Since terrorism has reached major European and US cities that were once considered safe, citizens have been subject to increasing state control.
To ensure comprehensive physical, political and national integrity, security has become a new ideology, the ‘mantra’ of civilised society.
EMBEDDED ART beschäftigt sich mit den Bedrohungen eines freien öffentlichen Lebens nach den Anschlägen von 9/11, Madrid, Moskau und London.
Fragen der Sicherheit haben den Alltag von Millionen von Menschen im 21. Jahrhundert verändert. Seit der Terror die sicher geglaubten Metropolen der USA und Europas erreichte, hat sich der staatliche Zugriff auf den Bürger ausgeweitet.
Im Dienst einer allumfassenden Gewährleistung körperlicher, politischer und staatlicher Unversehrtheit ist Sicherheit zu einer neuen Ideologie, zum „Mantra“ der zivilen Gesellschaft geworden.
Exhibition website here
Artist duo Lillevan and Zaji Chalem, originally commissioned to work on a project on ‘the war room’, expanded their range of activities, complementing their ‘war room’ scenario with a ‘digital situation table’.
In this work they drew on military history models such as the ‘Himmelbett’ aerial control zones used during World War II. The ‘Himmelbett’ was a chain of radar guidance systems for German night-fighters and was also dubbed the ‘Kammhuber Line’ after its creator and organiser, Major General Josef Kammhuber.
This air defence line stretched along the frontier of the German Reich from Denmark to southern France, a distance of over 1,000 kilometres. The system’s central tool was a multi-level frame, like a canopied four-poster bed, (‘Himmelbett’), which is viewed from above and combines all relevant data on a defined field like a table.
The ‘Himmelbett’ system underwent several evolutions from 1940 to 1942, which military historians have meticuously documented on the Internet.
Lillevan’s work on the Fraunhofer Institute’s ‘Multi-display workbench for interactive scene analysis and processing’ is however historically and aesthetically closer to our time. Data collected from drones, unmanned submarines or cameras mounted on autonomen jeeps can be consolidated on the ‘digital situation table’.
Excerpt of the Seeburg Himmelbett Video, projected from above on a horizontal table-screen
See pics below for documentation
©Lillevan/Zaji Chalem 2009
Lillevan and Zaji Chalem were also responsible for video-programming the 10-channel ‘Control Room’ installation at Embedded Art
Software programming by Zsolt Barat
Here are some video clips documenting the ‘Control Room’
Here’s a collage of images from research and preparatory stages of the project
Images copyright Embedded Art/BBM/Chalem/Lillevan
You’ll find an archive of research-images and sketches here
