Artist Statement

Text installation

The installation by Konrad Becker displays, carved in stone, what is probably the most deceitful medium of human expression, namely text. Like codes of law he presents theses which speak of deception, insecurity and distrust, pointing us to the simultaneity of truth and delusion.

Text is a mythical practice. Authors like to claim that words were dictated to them by reality. Infected with the unconscious, language vaporizes into collective dream. Attention is the key to intangible forms of power and coercion, inseparable from the reality of our drives and its very opposite: perceptual disintegration. The past slips away so fast it creates the illusion of change, the future is nonpredictable because nothing ever happens. Influence makes targets believe that ideas and desires originate in their own mind. Myth creation engineers consent by internalization. Psychological manipulation exploits the streams of desire stimulated by media
channels; libidinal attention feeds a plethora of ghosts multiplying every moment. The Evil Eyes of antiquity manifest in digital surveillance, social sorting and invisible categorization. The enigma of the Zombie: What is the difference between Death and the LivingDead, undead enough for work and consumption? Ignes fatui, foolish fires, ghostly lights seen hovering over swamps at night compel travelers to chase the strange and elusive glow. The mysteries of Information Societies do not hide in the shadow lands of technology but in the human nervous system. What is real is not certain, what is certain is not real.

• Konrad Becker is active in electronic media as an artist, author, composer as well as curator, producer and organiser. Director of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/ t0, and World-Information Institute (World-Information.Org), a cultural intelligence provider, co-founder of the seminal Public Netbase (1994–2006) he also created Monoton, a pioneering electronic music act, and the Global Security Alliance for cultural risk management.
  world-information.net/de

Full text (PDF) p. 21-24