Art

A Suitcase Filled With Heart

At the beginning there is a story. A reappraisal of feeling, put into words and released into the world. “Du dunkles Herz” (“You dark Heart”) by Tobias Gruseck comes as an appealing red booklet and is a story about a suitcase full of money that darkens hearts. But promoting literature depends on more than the content of the text. A myth around it is good, maybe an eccentric author, a scandal. Or a suitcase, in it: hearts. If you touch one of the hearts, or the oak leaf next to it, you suddenly hear voices. Text passages that match the object touched resound softly and wonderfully recited from the case and make you want to listen to the story.

A story is told here with multimedia and attention to detail

Jenny and Simon took on the presentation of the work and built the suitcase. Wired inside is a touch board from Bare Conductive® that is connected via conductive yarn to things that are historically significant and, in some cases, 3D printed. Touching the thread closes the circuit and the text passages stored on the chip and previously recorded with virtuosity are played.

  • The 3D printer of Fab Lab Siegen spit out the individual parts…
  • Painted with conductive paint, the components received a beautiful “old shine”…
Literature as a haptic experience

All this was first presented in Bad Säckingen at “Kunst trifft Handwerk,” an annual outdoor event at the picturesque Trompeterschlößchen, where Germany and Switzerland bundled streams of tourists before the pandemic moved in. The title of the event also fits perfectly with this haptic project, which combines literary effusion with gifted tinkering. Currently on display at Fab Lab Siegen.

By Marios Mouratidis, ago

Not Bad for Friday The Thirteenth

A contribution by Ingo Schultze-Schnabel

On the evening of that December day in 2019, I held in my hand the first copy of a 3D print of one of my designs.

Finished print still on the 3D printer

I have been working artistically with multipart images and objects since the 90s and was looking for a method to transform a design into a sculptural object from the 3D printer.

Members of Fab Lab Siegen accompanied me in several steps: From the basic information about the Fab Lab and its possibilities, the ways of designing from “my” graphics programme via CAD programmes to the printer control, a lot was new for me. But in the great working atmosphere it was fun to get involved with new things.

Now the new object hangs provisionally on the wall, for “test viewing”, so to speak. I am concerned with the mechanisms by which our perception “sees” something as a whole with the help of partial information. The quality of visual information, redundancy, the “information gap” – such terms run through my head.

3D print hung on the wall

Here in the work you can see how, despite the distances between the stripes, the impression quickly arises in many places that rectangles, seen in perspective, are being depicted there. The gap suddenly becomes information. With David Amend at the end of the day, I got to talk about how the exact same thing is happening with fake news, an area in which he had experience from a computer science perspective. This is how fragments become a narrative and how easily “truth” emerges in our minds. That brings me back to my artistic theme.

If you want to go a little deeper, you can find more material on my blog.

If you want to experience more art in Siegen, please refer to the ChaosFlux from 24-26 April. Mehr Infos: https://chaosflux.de/de/about/

By Marios Mouratidis, ago