The central theme of the collaborative artistic work of Nuno Maya and Carole Purnelle is societal transformation in the age of digitalisation and its socio-cultural implications. They are among the breed of artists who use digital technologies to promote new forms of perception and adaptation to the world, as well as social interaction and cultural expression. In pursuit of this aim, they create reactive installations in which the constructive action of the visitor is the conceptual focus. With their digital transformation of urban parameters, Ocubo manage to create unaccustomed perspectives on the city; perspectives in which humans themselves appear as the central medium of the artistic work.

Using large image projectors, Ocubo alter the architectural structures of public places and depict them as venues for socio-cultural happenings. Their accompanying working method is based on a process-orientated understanding of installation practice: Using the unconcealed application of materials, programmatic temporality, relation to the location and the offer of participation, they initiate situations in which an increased level of attention emerges for the interaction between sensory and social factors in public spaces.

+ Background: With the boom in digital technologies, “interactivity” has become the central paradigm of human-machine communication and interface design. As was similarly the case ten years ago, artists who today create reactive art see themselves facing an audience lacking in any elaborate knowledge of reactive art, characterised instead far more by a “plug-and-play” and “click-by-click” practice and thereby drilled in rapid recognition and understanding. The spectrum of reactive systems in art ranges from pieces in which the visitor is drawn directly into an activity without any prior conscious decision to participate and extends to simple “push the button” works where the controlled (human) action triggers a direct action on the part of the system. The latter type often means that the rules of the system are easy to read and understand. But the simplicity in interactivity designed in this way also has its disadvantages. The rapid understanding of an interactive series of actions in a work of art frequently leads to a purely superficial acceptance on the part of the visitor that equates understanding of the system’s functionality with the understanding of the work of art.

LichtRouten Piece: Human Tiles
The large-scale projection “Human Tiles” by Nuno Maya and Carole Purnelle continues the Portuguese tradition of structure façade design using tiled ornaments, but does so at the digital level. Ocubo use film recordings of public traffic to form the patterns. In the reduction down to form and colour, these are then integrated into a rapport that permanently creates new digital ornaments simultaneously with realtime movement. In this dynamic façade projection, the mosaic continuously changes in a kaleidoscopic way in tandem with the stream of visitors.

LichtRouten-location: Gerhardi Kunststofftechnik GmbH I Schlittenbacher Straße 2 / Loher Straße