“How are structure and meaning interrelated? At what point does meaningless become meaningful?” Geert Mul asks himself this as he’s constantly in search of correlation among things that may not seem related at first. In his practice, Mul explores different conceptual connections and he illustrates them through the use of various mediums. Projections, lenticulars, and light installations, Mul is a pioneer of media art.
Dutch artist, Geert Mul’s career began during his studies from 1985-1990 at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem where he studied computer animation. Upon graduation, Mul traveled through North America and Japan, where he began creating the systems for pop festivals. Mul has spent the last twenty years generating visual poetry through the combination of images into installations and audio-visual performances. This practice is what he believes takes meaningless collection of information and creating something meaningful from their associations, correlations, and speculations. Mul’s work has generated five awards and over fifteen commissioned art installations.
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam showed their admiration for Mul’s work by being the first museum to host an exhibition to showcase the vast body of work of Geert Mul. While the medium of each project is specific to each piece, the common denominator is the art’s ability to takes images from online that carry no particular meaning on their own but when paired with others, the composition comes to life. Experimentation with interactive elements and light installations cause each piece to be as captivating as the next. The exhibit showcases some of his works such as “This Land is Man-Made” (interactive), “Match of the Day” (prints, video, book), and “Big Data Poetry” (Audio-visual performance). “This Land is Man-Made” represents Dutch landscape while displaying an attitude about mourning and nostalgia. The poem on the screen draws its viewer in close to read, once this happens the screen changes to swirling water as if the viewer has fallen into it. This piece has been shown in museums in Rotterdam, Kyoto, and Scheidam.
“Match of the Day” is a piece that ties well into Mul’s strategy of correlation. Using computer programming, the piece selects two stills of international TV stations at random. The stills are selected by the program by identifying images that have similar attributes (example: both take place in forest). These pairs are what Mul calls ‘matches’ and they’re displayed to play with the viewer’s inability to see without interpretation. I like this idea because I do feel sometimes art is overanalyzed and people are often striving to identify a precise meaning with every moment in the piece. However, the artist may not have intended a message for those particular moments but was instead driven by aesthetics. “Big Data Poetry” combines sound with a triptych of projections. The projections are comprised of thousands of images that together create a stop-motion animation through the use of image analysis software. The sound that coincides is of various languages which causes the viewer to undulate between familiarity and foreignness.
The Lenticular Cloud I find to be the most intriguing of his work. An installation situated in the atrium of the world’s greenest building, The Edge, offers a unique take on one of the oldest methods of autostereoscopy. Comprised of thirty-four hanging and rotating panels, each of which display a variety of different images, the Lenticular Cloud is a kinetic installation visible from the building’s entry as well as the offices that sit within The Edge. Because the panels operate independent of one another, each panel is its own lenticular print – a technology that images become visible under different angle – which contains ten different images. With the constant draft that exists in the space, the panels – that are suspended by steel cables from a central pivot point – are constantly rotating to offer 1034 possible appearances. This concept of an endless amount of possibilities is derived from the company that commissioned the project, Deloitte. Deloitte is a company that offers financial advisory services such as auditing, consulting, among other things. Because of the nature of this industry, Deloitte is heavily reliant on databases. The Lenticular Cloud is reflective of this as it is a visualization of a database – a cloud full of endless outcomes that can conveniently be analyzed within one space.
I find this project interesting on two levels. One level being the sole technology involved. My interest in lenticular printing is clearly demonstrated as it is the focus of my first Digital Imaging project and the Lenticular Cloud has opened my eyes in terms of what can be produced with this technology. The more I explore lenticular printing, the more appreciation I gain for this project because there are so many components involved. The second level of interest stems from the concept of the installation. The challenge of the project is who it’s for. Deloitte is apart of possibly the most dissimilar industry to art. An industry so mathematical and methodical may appear to lack any connection to art. Geert Mul was able to find the artfulness in advisory that can be appreciated no matter what background one comes from.
Geert Mul’s body of work is an interesting one to analyze because he continues to toy with the same concept of associations. While the concept remains the same or similar, he’s constantly finding new ways to communicate it. “The moment when an unordered structure turns into a coherent structure. That is the moment when a story emerges, an image, a melody, architecture or poetry. The moment when emotion arises, the moment from nothing to something, the moment of creation.” Geert Mul’s words and art offer new insight on what it means to be related and how we are constantly subconsciously searching for an emergence of relationships.
22
February
RESEARCH PRESENTATION // ASSOCIATION + CORRELATION
