nils volker
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Presentation on Nils Volker for classTRANSCRIPT
Nils VölkerPresentation by Gaby Vasquez
About Völker
Born in Aalen, Germany 1979
Studied Visual Communication at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany from 1999 – 2004
He begun working as an artist mainly in physical computing and media art.
Völker has had 13 exhibitions where his piece were displayed from 2009 – 2012.
His piece “One Hundred and Eight” had been widely published in books and magazines and online, which kick started a series of installations based on inflating and deflating cushions. (There are a bunch)
One Hundred and Eight
This installation is an interactive piece made from garbage bags and fans, which are controlled by a microcontroller to selectively inflate and deflate using two cooling fans.
The piece is a large installation of garbage bags which react to movement, so when a visitor comes closer the bags retract accordingly to the visitor’s movements.
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Captured:A Homage to Light and Air
Captured is a work done by Nils and his bother Sven, who is a graphic designer, relating the elements of light and air.
Nils’ created 252 inflatable silver cushions, which are installed to the floor. Sven who created the four walls hanging along the sides to the artwork, contained 304 framed graphic pages.
The art piece was a temporary installation at MADE Space in Berlin. It was a 12 minute performance piece that also including sound.
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Markers & Spectators
With the collaboration of Christien Meindertsma, a designer from Rotterdam, Völker creates an interactive piece that illustrates how the same object is perceived differently.
The robot is mainly constructed with Legos. Its function is to dot the points that the visitor has looked at on the object, while it receives the data from the eye-tracker from the installation.
The installation was 6 x 6 meters large.
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Fountains
Fountains was created as an art piece for the 4th West Lake International Invitational Sculpture Exhibition. It is permanently at the Xixi Wetland Park in Hanzhou, China.
The installation is under water, which makes it unnoticeable, that is until someone walks across the bridge and the fountains begin to react to their movements.
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Variations on PiLight Paintings
Völker created a machine equipped with 16 LEDs, which would move around an area while a time exposure photo was taken. There were 50 created, printed, signed by Völker, and sold.
Each painting is based on a different range of consecutive decimal places of Pi (π).
The digits defined if and where the circles would be drawn and also the color.
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Spherical Robot
All it is is a ball-shaped robot using the Lego Midstorms NXT.
No real deep meaning to it or anything, according to Völker is was fun playing with it.
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Discussion QuestionsDid you find any of the works interesting? If so which? Why? How do you think Völker’s works fit into New Media?