ART CITIES:Berlin-Ralf Baecker

The work of Ralf Baecker is focused towards installations and machines which explore the poetic and artistic potential of technology. With a background in computer science, Baecker unfolds the various processes that occur underneath the interfaces of common devices and systems, turning the machines inside out and revealing its ways of working.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: NOME Archive

Ralf Baecker creates installations in which the user is confronted with a machine that is not under control of its own, but rather engaged in processual existence that occurs between the machine and the viewer. By translating formal systems into physical processes, Ralf Baecker investigates the relation between thinking and the world. “Order+Noise (Interface I)” is a new installation by Ralf Baecker at NOME in Berlin. The Installation negotiates the boundary between two interacting systems. Motors, strings and elastic bands are set in motion by the random signals of Geiger-Müller tubes which pick up the natural ambient radiation of the earth. Research and experiments essential to the realization of this exhibition were carried out within the framework of Baecker’s research project “Time of Non-Reality” at the Graduate School of the University of the Arts Berlin. The installation explores the interface at which these elements influence one another, to reproducing space and time in constantly shifting configurations, reproduces space and time in constantly shifting configurations. Here, what underlines the aesthetic experience is the materiality by which action produces knowledge, transforming data space into real space.  His systems seek to expose the relation between thinking and the world, thus turning his machines into epistemological objects rather than just tools.

Info: NOME, Dolziger Straße 31, Berlin, Duration: 23/4-18/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 15:00-17:00, http://nomeproject.com