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Programming: Mathias Antlfinger, Ute Hörner
Biography
Born in 1962. She began her studies with Fine Arts at the Kunstakademie in Münster,
and Social Sciences at the Westfälische Wilhelms Universität, Münster.
In 1985, she changed to the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, graduated in 1992,
and completed a supplementary course of studies in Audiovisual Media at the
Academy for Media Arts, Cologne. From 1993 to 1996 she worked as artistic collaborator
at the Design Faculty of the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar; since 1996 she
has been Professor of Design Studies, 'Rauminszenierung' and Video in the Design
Faculty of the FH Bielefeld. Anja Wiese works with new and traditional media
in three-dimensional space.
Conceptual Description
"Those who cannot see must listen.
trance machine consists of a rectangular field of 32 circles resembling tape reels and rotating clockwise. Each reel contains the fragment of a sentence. When the user clicks a tape reel, the fragment of a sentence becomes audible then slowly fades away. Once called up, the fragment of one sentence allocates itself to other fragments in the fashion of a memory game. Four fragments at a time add up to one 'Sinnsatz', or unit of sense. The sentences are the reflections a fictional person makes about herself. For instance, they read 'I had great power of imagination, much too much to be satisfied with mere reality', or 'Sleep was part of my work'.
The user interface composed of grey reels revolving against a black background is subject to minimal optical variation in the course of the game: reels change their direction of rotation, vanish, and then re-appear or swap places with each other. To indicate that a complete sentence has been produced, four tapes are joined up to form a unit. Due to its sign-like character, the surface image is a field of orientation in the process of the game. On the other hand, its permanent uniformity and the constant rotation of all individual elements makes it an optical trance field of non-information." (Anja Wiese)
"Trance is a very ancient method of gaining distance from oneself, of departing from ingrained habits of thought, conditioned patterns of meaning, for relativising them and making new ones possible." (Barbara Köhler)