Plot:Bach

The BIX media façade communicates in and with the urban space with abstract images in rhythm to music.

Based on Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier II, Fugue VII, the artist Thomas Baumann and the conductor Michael Klaar have cooperated in the creation of a singular work that relies on the course of the music to define the BIX light and media façade. Drawn from the language of music, the structure allows the various voices of alto, soprano, tenor and bass to flow into an image program that refers to the potential to transform the concept of a digital square, thus creating a kind of visual scale.

A key concept in art ever since Malevitch, the black square has been attacked repeatedly and consistently examined in the course of the general questioning of the image in the 20th century. The architecture of the Kunsthaus Graz breaks with this standard form of the right angle and takes its form, biomorphic and fitting into its surroundings, into the urban space. In his approach to the façade, Thomas Baumann works nonetheless with a square grid pattern, on the one hand creating a conflict and a visual dialogue with the round shape of the architecture and the light installation on the external skin; on the other hand, the visual score refers to the digital programming language used for the implementation and its most reduced form.

Underlying Baumann’s works is an intensive examination of electronically controlled processes that makes a winking reference to today’s faith in technology, but which does not combine into a superficial formulation; instead, it manages to involve current technology and the resulting strategies in an artistic practice. The dance of images that crystallizes out of the collaboration between the musician and the artist acts on the audience’s sense of time and turns the static architecture into a location of performative development, where space is perceptible in unison with time.

As a result, Baumann’s work is not self-contained, but should be interpreted within a cycle of works: the Plot:Bach is also based on a machine – a plotter – that creates images according to a mathematical program. In his work, Baumann draws in elements of a classical-modern image language with new forms of representation in order to generate his own language from it and to make precisely this connection understandable for the observer: Plot:Bach will examine the principles and possibilities of the media façade and provides a sensually challenging narrative that constantly presents itself in new forms, whose language is the geometric shapes of the rectangle.
 

This makes Plot:Bach literally both a conspiracy with the architecture and also a story that employs the façade via image, rhythm and the resulting episodic development as an instrument of communication, thereby creating something like a screenplay for the electronic skin of the building.
 

Thomas Baumann
born 1967 in Salzburg, lives in Vienna
1985-1992 Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna (Max Melcher, Bruno Gironcoli)
1995-1996 Cité des Arts, Paris
 

Michael Klaar
born 1973 in Vienna,
lives in Vienna
studied piano and conducting in Vienna, Stockholm and Paris
 

Plot:Bach DVD
is available at the Kunsthaus Graz shop and by order.

Plot:Bach was first presented on the BIX media façade in 2004.