[ISEA2011] Artist Statement: Nils Völker — One Hundred and Eight

Artist Statement

One Hundred and Eight is a wall-mounted installation mainly made out of garbage bags and cooling fans. The bags are selectively inflated and deflated in controlled rhythms, creating wavelike animations across the wall. One Hundred and Eight, exhibited in ISEA2011 Uncontainable, became the starting point for a series of installations based upon the inflating and deflating of cushions made from different materials. The largest one was made from 252 large silver bags for the exhibition captured  – a homage to Light and Air. This was followed by further site specific installations such as Thirty Six Art for Lab Gnesta, Forty eight for the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Seventy Five  for Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei and Eighty Eight commissioned by the Gewerbemuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland. Nils Völker’s most recent work is 64 CCFL, a light installation that is mainly made with so-called cold cathode fluorescent lights which are normally used as backlights for computer screens.

  • Nils Völker is an artist and communication designer living and working in Berlin. He creates artworks with the means of physical computing somewhere at the intersection of technology and art.  Often his work consists out of large amounts of everyday objects combined and rearranged in an unusual way. Currently he is working on his first large scale work to be placed permanently outdoors as part of a sculpture park in Hangzhou, China.

Full text and images (PDF) p.  116-119