«Floating Exhibition»
About the TWIN ZONE by Markus Selg
by Thomas Oberender
Gallery spaces are generally neutral in their appearance and create a zone of calm around their exhibits. Galerie Guido W. Baudach in Berlin is also such a white cube, but in Markus Selg’s exhibition TWIN ZONE, the ban mile around the works dissolves, as does the closed box of the exhibition space itself. A series of pairs of works are shown, in which the physical manifestation of the works is simultaneously juxtaposed with their virtual appearance. The gallery itself also doubles and appears in a virtual 3D version designed by Selg in addition to the real space. Using an augmented reality experience app, the exhibition space near Potsdamer Strasse in Berlin is thus connected to an artificial topography. Visitors enter a place that unexpectedly becomes an exhibit itself.
TWIN ZONE is the rare case of an exhibition of an exhibition. In fact, this only happens exceptional cases, for example in reconstructions of historical exhibitions, because the gallery or museum usually sees itself as a kind of display that shows everything possible, but keeps itself out of the picture. Exhibitions are constantly reorganised and replayed, but the aura of the basic space is usually discreet. It withdraws, keeps the «outside» away and directs the focus onto the exhibited works and their audience. It’s a bit like a theatre, only there the box is black and people look at it from the outside instead of walking around in it.
At first glance, TWIN ZONE looks like a traditional exhibition of large-format computer prints and sculptures. However, thanks to the augmented reality app that Markus Selg developed for this project, the virtual twins of these sculptures and paintings as well as earlier works that are not physically present, such as 1999’s Teerhof, can also be experienced in the gallery. They appear unexpectedly on the audience’s smartphone displays and float gently through the room or appear as additional exhibits on the walls.
The presence of digital artworks in galleries or urban spaces is nothing unusual today, but the concept of the TWIN ZONE exhibition sets a different accent. It brings tangible works of art into a direct relationship with their virtual derivatives and creates a porous space that connects the two levels of reality. As a visitor to the gallery, you can choose which path of manifestation of a work you would like to follow.
The AR app TWIN ZONE appears on the exhibition’s list of works as an independent piece, and it is not only the work that gives the exhibition its title, but also the most succinct formulation of the concept. These rooms are about the fraternal relationship between virtual and real objects. They do not originate from opposing spheres, but rather the exhibition creates and shows a space for their relational coexistence. At the same time, the artist’s approach goes one step further in that the physical objects in the exhibition ultimately also appear as emanations of generic structures, as products of codes and their mutation and assemblage. Selg’s floor sculptures and wall paintings show plant and biomorphic textures, play with the patterns of crystals and geological formations, man-made ornaments and signs, graffiti and the grids of circuit diagrams. These biomorphic and technoid textures cover the tangible works in the exhibition as well as the virtual objects.
Whether thing or image, the objects lead to images and digital images lead to data, which in turn lead to digital and sculptural objects, which are again depicted, sampled and shared, and so on ad infinitum. The transitions between tangible object and imaginary object are fluid and Selg’s central work and the entire space of the exhibition follow and serve this flow.
The app that visualises this dual nature of things and beings is the real highlight of the exhibition. Once you have downloaded the TWIN ZONE app at the entrance to the gallery, the screen of your smartphone becomes a probe with which visitors can scan the space and suddenly grasp virtual objects and observe their existence, just as you suddenly discover small creatures in clear water under a powerful microscope that are there all the time without our noticing them.
Markus Selg has not only created his individual works in two forms of existence, but has also scanned the rooms of the gallery and transformed them into a 3D model that creates a virtual extension of the gallery on site. Suddenly, you look through virtual openings and windows and a cityscape under a glowing red sky appears in the middle of the actual rooms.
The AR app virtualises the exhibition space and integrates it into a meta-space on site, making it radically tangible what it is like when everything is just a surface. This blending and mixing of physical and virtual reality deterritorialises the spaces and turns the gallery into a sophisticated daydream of art. In this TWIN ZONE, visitors move around and see the rest of the audience on their screens amidst virtual and real works, as if the people currently present in the exhibition were also further exhibits in this enriched and permeable world of art.
Perhaps the theatre of the future will look like this or something similar, in which a world filled with real and virtual things and beings appears on stage, viewed through data glasses, in which there is nothing that cannot be represented in the here and now. In Berlin’s TWIN ZONE, visitors to the gallery see how the boundaries of the white cube dissolve and the space fills up with immaterial objects and virtual architecture that transports the building into a different urban space and atmosphere.
Extended exhibition
In one of the back rooms of the physical gallery, the ready made of a yellow recycling bin stands in front of the square mural BIRTH OF A PORTAL, which shows an archaic-looking ring of wood and metal on a black background. But when you let your AR probe wander around the room, the same yellow bin suddenly appears as a digital object in the glowing red evening sky high above, above the vanished ceiling. It floats above the scene like a satellite and below it, in the center of the room, is the huge portal that can be seen on the mural. The physical gallery space opens up through the app and merges into a virtual extension, an inner courtyard surrounded by wide concrete steles and crowned by a high stone cornice. The ring floating in this courtyard is part of the AR work THE PORTAL / MAGNOLEYE, which Markus Selg has integrated into the system of his TWIN ZONE.
This resonance of one work in the other and the coexistence of real and virtualised works is the core idea of TWIN ZONE. It creates an «expanded exhibition», which is a complex work of art itself that creates shimmering transitions between real and virtual reality and ultimately revolves around the question of what concept of «world» we have in mind when we talk about reality? What does it mean that in the 21st century we are creating a parallel reality in which every thing and being leads a second, digital life in large data farms? Selg’s exhibition is not media-critical in the strict sense, but it takes the data based meta-reality as its starting point and links it with other meta-ideas such as cultural myths, social reform ideas or old cosmologies.
As a TWIN ZONE, the gallery space becomes the «receiver» not only of physical works, but also of truly unlimited manifestations of objects and beings whose form and responsiveness are becoming increasingly complex and life-like and maintain contact with their material relatives. However, the TWIN ZONE is also the «recipient» of meta-ideas such as that of cyclically renewing life. It can be seen in the figure of the scarab, which Selg incorporates into his virtual portal, or in the 3D print of the sculpture FRACTAL FLORISHING II (Metamorphing).
Today, the fact that objects are «activated» is a popular formulation for their use by performers. In TWIN ZONE, however, the space itself is activated. The exhibition spaces are an active part of the work, real and fictitious at the same time, something real and at the same time the manifestation of an electronic dream. In the gallery’s white cube, visitors enter an immersive environment in which everything revolves around them. The audience is in the centre of it and every object in this space is a prop of a larger worldbuilding that «sees» and involves the visitors.
Micro Drama
Before our eyes and the lens of the phone camera, a biomorphic techno-creature suddenly appears in the gallery, floating through the air and inhabiting the space like ourselves and the other visitors surrounding it. MAGNOLEYE is the name of this digital creature, which Markus Selg has moulded from the scanned fruit bodies of a magnolia. A derivative of this figure exists as an NFT and can be seen as a virtual mural in the gallery, AWAKENING SEED. Like a flying dragon with a hundred eyes, this digital creature moves its winding paths through the room and occasionally dives through the magical ring of the AR work PORTAL / MAGNOLEYE. Markus Selg calls this function of the app Micro Drama. It transforms the street space in front of the Berlin gallery into a stage for the appearance of this shiny red dragon snake and the majestic suspended portal for its journey into another world.
Markus Selg’s TWIN ZONE has nested in the real building like an alien. This app is therefore the central work in the exhibition. It is a meta-work that incorporates other works and creates a special viewing zone. Thanks to it, it’s as if you enter a computer game and are able to walk through it. But not quite. Because you are actually standing in a real gallery. Its walls are white, the floor bare. You can see everything in this exhibition with the naked eye. However, this «everything» is of course somewhat less than what is actually present in this room. But that’s often the case, after all, you don’t always see the entire series and good works of art also create a dialogue on their own as individual pieces.
Markus Selg develops his works with the help of digital technologies. Instead of brush and palette, he uses Photoshop for his paintings. Data are Selg’s pigments and characterise the aesthetics of his virtual and physical objects. In recent years, he has increasingly used 3D software and AI to create his worlds in galleries and museums, on theatre stages or entirely in virtual space.
Data Skins
Nowadays, it is less and less digital photographs and more and more often 3D scans that Selg takes with his smartphone in everyday life or in museums and adds to his variable pool of digital 3D elements and graphic textures from which his works are created. For example, the 3D scan of a tomb sculpture was incorporated into Selg’s large-format paintings MISSING TWIN I and II, while the scan of the Uta statue from Naumburg Cathedral became part of the drapery of the gathered mantle of the polypropylene sculpture FRACTAL FLORISHING, which also exists in a slightly modified form as a digital 3D sculpture, respectively a NFT.
The various scans wander through Selg’s practice and the example of the transformation of the photographs of Uta von Naumburg shows that his works are not digital copies of physical pieces, but rather extract specific details from them, place them in new contexts and thus form an autonomous work. Selg has been collecting the diverse elements of his works for years. Even a simple smartphone transforms objects and environments into scans, codes, data and digital surfaces that can be shared and processed immediately.
Metaphorically speaking, these scans remove the skin from the world. From now on, it can be placed on any surface of a CGI object or become the surface of physical objects. Technically, this process seems like a transplant. And of course the question arises as to what is under this surface? What kind of life does this thousand-eyed dragon have? In the TWIN ZONE, everything is surface. The eye only sees the outside, the two-dimensional texture of the «data surfaces». What does aura mean in this world? If everything can be synthesised, what is the original source of the images?
Selg’s objects and pictures are not works «after nature» and yet they slip into the «code» of nature, read the pattern of a snake’s skin and detach it from the biological body, just like the tree’s bark or the finely veined structure of plant leaves. These textures combine with each other in Selg’s works, bringing biomorphic forms into contact with technomorphic patterns and thus creating fascinating hybrid creatures. Their uniqueness has less to do with the individuality of these figures or the artist than with his sense that they are obviously part of a matrix of life that permeates everything and connects the most diverse times and material and non-material realities.
Instead of telling biographical or historical stories, Selg concentrates on the formal language of the non-human. He pays attention to the repetitive patterns of a species’ life in every living being or the typical patterns in inorganic compounds and human cultures. He thus constructs and utilises the relationships between these patterns, linking the ornaments in the fabrics of African nomads with the patterns of circuits and crystals. His aesthetics are combined with a perspective that is interested in codes and patterns, myths of return and spiritual forces. From this transhistorical material of archetypes and symbols, Selg builds his figures, his rice farmer people, indignants or dancers, his temples and portals.
Frottage
On closer inspection, the «digital skins» that Selg collects as 3D scans and covers his figures and objects with look like a contemporary form of frottage. They show the translucency of sculptural objects in a two-dimensional medium. It is often biological structures such as fractal patterns of leaves or the structure of the plaster of a house façade removed by means of a scan that flow into the artist’s design processes as material. As with the rubbing of physical objects on paper or fabric, 3D scans also create graphic textures that depict a three-dimensional reality in two dimensions, i.e. as a surface that detaches itself from the object and can cover other bodies or become part of larger compositions. Max Ernst once worked according to this principle and saw his frottages of leaves, fruit bodies or pieces of wood as a partial liberation from his own creator ego and a starting point for creative processes.
The scans of biological and technological surfaces recur in Selg’s physical sculptures, computer prints and installations as well as in the virtual objects of his NFTs or AR and VR experiences. His work therefore oscillates between «light» and «heavy» artworks - «light», according to art scientist Noam Gal, in the sense of disembodied and immaterial, apart from the carrier media of the data, and «heavy» in the sense of processed materials in the physical world.
In this sense, the TWIN ZONE exhibition is a hybrid of «heavy» and «light» objects. It gives a foretaste of a future world in which digital objects and beings enrich our reality in the same way that the scent of a flower has always enriched the evening air. For Selg, reality is both sensual and immaterial at the same time. His «heavy», physical sculptures, environments and murals also show through their generic aesthetics that they were not generated «according to nature», but according to the code of nature. They are matrix objects. Selg superimposes the same digital textures over their physical plastic or aluminium bodies as he does over the software-based 3D bodies of CGI figures and objects.
Archaic Revival
Selg’s visual work has been close to the world of theatre from the very beginning. In a double sense, it is also the «performance» of a world, generated as a physical performance on the basis of scripts, highly formalised and far less authentic than it appears on stage. Selg’s first gallery exhibition Nur Mut in 2002 presented a series of life-size figures for which the artist had written his own theatre play alongside the monumental sculpture of an open hand. The text was on display in the gallery and was also read out there.
The style that characterises the installation of his exhibitions is also theatrical. Selg often darkens the gallery spaces and deliberately illuminates his objects. The world of theatre is also a world of repetition. Every evening, what saw the light of day at the premiere is repeated. And every premiere repeats and brings back to life a piece that has already lived in a different place. Nobody «is» Lear. The structure of this role wanders through the centuries and bodies. The theatre world itself is based on a kind of archaic revival, to quote the title of a series of figures by Markus Selg. Long before the temples, shrines and portals that he installs on stage in the joint productions with director Susanne Kennedy, he created these overlapping worlds in his paintings and scenic environments in his exhibitions, in which archaic motifs merge with contemporary incarnations.
Selg’s images of people show hybrid creatures from a genealogy of Djinn-like figures and contemporary types that seem to come from a rave or the future. With a sculpture like Traumstele from the Archaic Revival series, it would be difficult to decide whether this purple, mummy-like sculpture on a light blue circuit base represents something very old or comes from the world of tomorrow. In TWIN ZONE, the two female figures in the portraits MISSING TWIN I and II, which could also appear in the same form as figures in one of his productions with Susanne Kennedy, have a similarly ultra-modern and neo-archaic effect.
The portal and figure paintings in Selg’s exhibitions suggest that people in these rooms can immerse themselves in the matrix of codes and energy flows and travel through time. Where does Markus Selg’s interest in the topic of transition and travelling come from? His oeuvre is characterised by restlessness and rebellion. It is a spiritual revolt that leads from the world of the visible to the contact points of an invisible world.
References to Bruno Taut, Bernhard Hoetger, El Lissitzky, Soviet Constructivism and the evocative language of 1920s propaganda art run through Selg’s early works, all personalities and movements for whom well-made art was not everything, but who wanted to support a social movement that went beyond the individual and aimed for reform and change in the real world.
Threshold Spaces
One of the appealing aspects of theatre is that certain ideas or conceptions of the world are actually realised in the tangible real world - as performances. Conceptions become performances. And in a very similar way, Markus Selg’s computer-generated images unfold spatially on stage, becoming three-dimensional and creating a liminal situation in which a strange «twin zone» is also created on stage - bodies that are sensually concrete and yet belong to fictional figures that appear in them. The stage space absorbs the figures like a spaceship and transports them to another world and another time in the theatre, or to a bardo, an intermediate realm between death and life, physical existence and complete virtualisation.
It is therefore logical that Selg and Kennedy allow the audience to enter this intermediate and transformational space in performances such as Einstein on the Beach, Coming Society or Oracle, where they become a passive, active part of the scenic processes. Theatre-goers explore the scenic environment, are surrounded by Selg’s sculptures and video films, and in between the professional performers act like beings from another world, in a seemingly synthetic and masked body, with whose flesh and finiteness almost every character in the plays by Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg struggles.
At Galerie Guido W. Baudach, the presence of these physical and artificial-looking bodies is taken over by the objects that become visible thanks to the AR app. In this way, TWIN ZONE shows what Selg also finds fascinating about theatre - it is about contact (german: Kontakt) as one of his exhibitions in Munich 2005 was called, between different times, spaces and beings and the flash of another reality in ours. Selg’s exhibitions therefore almost always create a scenic situation and install transitional objects in it. From Selg’s Nürnberger Altar at the Kunsthalle Nuremberg (2005) to his gateway projects of Weltausstellung (2000) at the Kunstverein Braunschweig and the Amnesia / Chronik / Testament trilogy (2004-2005) in galleries in Berlin and Cologne, his exhibitions create cult-related spaces from which the theatre once emerged. As a visual artist, Selg goes one step further with the creation of the meta-world of his TWIN ZONE AR app, because in this the spaces and objects are tangible and virtual at the same time, «heavy» and «light», here and not here. The works drift in this TWIN ZONE and entering the gallery spaces in Berlin’s Pohlstraße also means, in a way, stepping «out» of them into another reality thanks to the app. Selg’s TWIN ZONE creates a porous space in which the visitors see the rest of the audience on the screens of their monitors as real as if they were looking at them with the naked eye, although the virtual scenario in which the others move is a pure data spell.
Floating Exhibition
The contrast between virtuality and materiality dissolves to a certain extent in Selg’s TWIN ZONE and turns both into something coexisting, through which our experience of realities flows like a stream of thoughts or feelings. As we know, love knows no strict separation between «me» and someone else. Nothing is more immersive than feelings such as love or horror. I am «in» someone else and he or she is in me. And so in TWIN ZONE, the data bodies and data spaces interpenetrate with the physical, sensual situation. A floating exhibition is created, the gliding into one another of otherwise strictly separate realities and the guests drift between them and experience a gentle, playful dislocation, as they can change the location of their experiences and observations without leaving it.
Unlike in a VR experience, in an AR experience the reality in which someone’s body is located is not substituted by the simulated reality of data glasses. While VR productions actually beam their viewers into another reality, in an AR experience you remain on location while this location is enriched with digital objects that you would not be able to see without the camera eyes of the AR app. TWIN ZONE thus creates a hybrid reality in which the material and immaterial visibly interpenetrate, whereby the disruptive moment in Selg’s work results from the fact that his approach of viewing every form of appearance, whether physical or virtual, as a pure surface means that he also treats the white cube like any other form of body - he virtualizes it, removes its skin and puts a new one over it, thus turning the exhibition space into one object among many.
It takes a few moments for this situation to unfold. As you enter the gallery from the street, everything is as usual at first. In the first room, the exhibition shows two large-format computer prints on canvas. On a small, deserted square, the tower of a façade scaffolding stands like a viewing platform, offering a view over a wall running in the background on the left. In the depths of the painting HOME (Twin Zone), a cone-shaped mountain towers over a portal covered in graffiti that resembles a real building by Bruno Taut in Berlin. The sky above the square is streaked with glowing red veils of cloud. The same fiery sky and square can also be seen in the neighboring picture PAST LOVE. At its center is the nude sculpture of a seated woman, reminiscent of sculptures by Bernhard Hoetger. Here, too, the female sculpture, its plinth and the background buildings are covered in graffiti tags and murals. They appear strikingly often in Selg’s pictures and rooms. Like his digital textures, they form a second «skin» full of hidden codes and messages in public space.
The portrait-format print PAST LOVE has cloudy zones and pixel streaks in the center of the picture, which refer to the digital medium and the collage character of the image. Again and again, Selg’s works draw attention to the medium in which they appear. They are not overwhelming art. Rather, the pathos and energy of these works arise from the open reference back to his generic reality: these works are created from data. A picture like PAST LOVE shows the different sources and qualities of the digital image particles, color surfaces, pixel fields, image fragments and graphic snippets, which are put together by painterly gestures without erasing the fractures. In the virtual spaces that Selg creates and in which he hides numerous «Easter eggs», e.g. old Volksbühne posters or one of his glass boxes from the project THE SUN MACHINE IS COMING DOWN in Berlin’s ICC 2021, digitally generated dirt is actually very important, because the glowing cigarette butt takes away the smoothness of the virtual garbage can and at the same time stands for traces of life in nature.
Temporary Autonomous Zone
Although this shimmering experiential space is at the center of TWIN ZONE, the human figure plays an important role in it. The neon-yellow floor sculpture FRACTAL FLORISHING is reminiscent of the artist’s figurative sculptures, which have traits of indigenous fetishes and at the same time of future beings or cyborgs. They usually do not show a face, but wear a mask like warriors or ritual figures. The 3D sculpture FRACTAL FLORISHING is also a hybrid of scans of a Gothic sculpture of Uta von Naumburg, another female figure and parts of the creature MAGNOLEYE. From the original statue of Uta by a Gothic master, Selg takes only the torso of the woman and her gesture of pulling the fabric of her cloak over her chin and gathering it in front of her chest. In place of the proudly raised head of the countess with her crown, Selg places the face of a modern-looking woman looking down, sitting naked on a stone with her hands clasped behind her neck. Two further arms emerge from her back and intertwine behind another head, and this pattern continues with slight variations, creating an elegant arc of sculptural sections that are repeated right up to the top of this sculpture, which is a good one and a half meters high. The generic form of the heads and arms is reminiscent of the depictions of Buddhist and Hindu deities with their many limbs. The only difference is that in Markus Selg’s work this multiplication increases to an expressive, plant-like form that looks as if a modern female shoot is sprouting from the Gothic figure, producing more and more offspring. More and more arms and heads wind upwards until the naked torso at the very top becomes a circle of lambent snake heads that blaze like a torch around a thorny staff while the hands clutching it. FRACTAL FLORISHING can be interpreted as a symbol of human flourishing, as a portrait of the human lifespan. The self-similarity of its elements refers to manifestations of nature as well as mathematical and technological processes that are cold and - not in a moral sense - inhuman.
TWIN ZONE is a porous work of art designed for our stay in it. It creates a temporary autonomous zone in which the «real world» is inextricably linked and accompanied by its digital shadow. In ancient myths, these shadows were Djinns and other spirits. Today, software programs perform much of this magic. The elegant and at the same time radical aspect of Selg’s works is that they make it possible to experience that it does not matter whether they manifest themselves digitally or in real material form. The view of the world that is revealed in them takes a different view of «reality» and abandons the idea of the original, the origin or the stability of solid bodies.
The exhibition concept of TWIN ZONE radicalizes the artist’s idea of understanding the world as an imagination, as an abundance of phenomena whose codes, patterns and temporary bodies he creates a stage for. TWIN ZONE no longer dims the light in the exhibition space, but shines into another world. It creates a special place in the world that is strongly reminiscent of the «temporary autonomous zone» described by the philosopher and writer Hakim Ben in Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism. In it, the otherwise prevailing rules and power structures disappear for a short time. Here, dichotomies such as virtual and real, factual and fictitious, material and immaterial, owned by someone or accessible to all, dissolve. Regardless of whose possession Selg’s works from this exhibition at Galerie Guido W. Baudach may end up in, in the TWIN ZONE they remain generally accessible and exist in a parallel world of data that grows daily and is not just a copy of the physical world, but is preparing to develop a life of its own.
Translated by Henry Tse