An invitation to the “Human Network”

July 2020
How are people doing? Words, information and images are flooding our senses. Where to put all those feelings like fear, hope, loneliness, being overwhelmed or full of confidence? How do satisfaction or despair look or sound? What colour is the pursuit of happiness?
Human Network
is an art project comprising three levels of expression, which enables the individual to determine their own position by means of thought sequences, expressions of emotion and visions of current events. The intention is to bring together and exhibit these sensually experienced human “soul moments” into one or more objects. This should illuminate an interior view that is largely isolated and transform it into the symbolic, an astonishing and stimulating stocktaking for all viewers and actors.
The starting point for the project is the current social challenges and upheavals as well as the consequences of the associated social changes – worldwide and regionally. This also, but by no means only, refers to the worrying cuts that are being caused by the corona pandemic, globalisation, climate crisis, environmental destruction, loss of democracy and increasing digitalisation. As an artist, I think about these issues very intensively and would like to ask interested people and artist colleagues to participate and try to create a creative network with small contributions. With this project I explicitly address people in social, cultural, educational and life-accompanying institutions.

Let us connect to a large network that grows beyond the emotional states of individuals, let us spin threads from person to person and let these contacts merge into a literally touching overall picture. Connectedness through thoughts: How are they/we doing today? Words, information and images flood our minds. Where to put all those feelings like fear, hope, loneliness, overstrain or confidence? How do satisfaction or despair feel? What colour is the pursuit of happiness? With my project I would like to tell about this time of ours, to collect fragments from people’s experiences and how they process what they have experienced.

Levels of expression :

1. picture/painting/application/handwork/scissor cut/prose/lyrics

2. sound / music / singing / noise

3. scenic movement/dance/ acting

Connect, let us weave our threads of thought! Practically, the connecting threads could be physically represented in the exhibition object(s) (area 1), for example, by bast, twine, straw, grass, willow, fabric, wool, plastic, canvas or some kind of “poetic vein”. The pictorially interlinked tiles of feelings or thoughts in various techniques, i.e. the work of the participants, should not normally exceed the dimensions of approx. 30 by 20 centimetres. Deviations in shape and size are however possible. The decisive factor here is what the respective creator wants to express. A little information from the designer would also be desirable: name or abbreviation, possibly place of residence and a keyword for the object/hanger of his small work. This information could perhaps be placed in the lower right-hand corner of the format or attached to a thread or similar.
The submissions for section 2 (music/sound), again with brief information about the creator, should be audio files of 30 seconds each, which, analogous to the visual variant, should express emotions or fragments of thoughts and may well have a spontaneous character. I would like to combine these acoustic mini-files into a colourful sound object, which will also include a visual component. This will result in a two-dimensional sound carpet. Its visual part could consist of a surface of equal-sized checks, which as key stimuli or pictorial markers correspond to of the acoustic mini-works behind them. If you click on one of the checks, the music or the corresponding background noise to the relevant segment of the sound carpet would be played.
The same principle, so my idea, is used for the design of the artistic object in area 3 (dance/acting), only here 30 seconds long video files are linked together. The resulting visual carpet also shows checks of the same size (possibly still images), behind which the entire video sequences accessible by touch are hidden. Their content is once again human “soul moments”, just as the installations in areas 1 and 2 make them visible or audible, only this time as moving images on a screen.
I see my project Netzwerk Mensch as a contribution to an interactive examination of human emotions in the social tension between current events and individual artistic reflection. The basis for its realisation is the cooperation/networking of people interested in art, who allow sudden insights into their emotional world, with me as an artist. I, for my part, am dependent on the cooperation of galleries and cultural institutions for the effective public realisation and presentation of the project. It is important in this respect that the state of Brandenburg supports my project idea.