Susanna Flock

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The exhibition includes a selection of Susanna Flocks recent works and new works derived from her current research into the relationship between the body and its technologically-mediated environment. The loop is a recurring theme through all her works in the exhibition. The video installation W-A-S-D addresses the cycle of death and respawning in the digital world of computer games. The work is concerned with the question of what death means in a simulated digital reality and with which methods the concept of infinity is affected by digital culture. The movement of slowly scrolling through the image culture of the present sets the rhythm for the video work fetish finger. Recurring elements of the video are generated images and the gab between materiality and virtuality.   In the mobile video installation „vacuums visuals“, not only the hoover robots, but also the projected images are trapped in their own loops. „In between Loops“ brings together works that examine our globally connected experience arising from the fusion of real and virtual space.

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Things that Stay Susanna Flock and Leonhard Müllner Production for festival of regions 2017

Under the programme of festival of regions 2017, Susanna Flock and Leonhard Muellner utilised the online marketplace „willhaben.at“ to get a grasp of the town Marchtrenk through its discarded items. Digital scans were made of the purchased objects. Conserved in digital space, the things are no longer exposed to the process of decay. At the same time, the information about the size and material of the objects becomes blurry, their functionality partly unreadable. Through the 3-D scanner they get their digitally simulated data double. Extracted from willhaben.at, the circulation of consumption is interrupted. At the end of the festival the original products became once again visible and were raffled in an event. Furthermore, the cultural anthropologist Robin Klengel was engaged to investigate the relationship of things to their owners, especially with a focus on willhaben.at and presented his study in a talk.

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Desktop Cinema: Post-Internet aesthetics, curated by Branka Benčić and Miriam de Rosa. Desktop Cinema covers digital narratives and post-Internet art and directs its interests to the new audio-visual practices of artists and the influence of the Internet on recent video.  The exhibition draws attention to a shift in interest to new media forms, the Internet as context, and new spaces of flows, stream of images, digital distribution platforms that take part in the creation of a new visual language and a new post-Internet / digital aesthetic. Works by artists Susanna Flock and Kevin B. Lee shape and reconfigure the dispositives of production and representation.

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Forming Storming Norming Performing artbook by Susanna Flock

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In Forming Storming Norming Performing, Susanna Flock focuses on the team-building process, taking up its visual language. The objective of team-building workshops is to increase efficiency within a group of employees. The participants are involved in games that create sculptural body formations. Just as important as the exercises are the self-critical feedback sessions, in which each participant speaks about what he/she could do better. Forming Storming Norming Performing examines these methods, questioning them critically while accentuating and concentrating them as an absurd image. Flock adopts a humorous approach to the infinite loop of optimisation mania enforced by new management methods.

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CROSSING EUROPE Innovative Award – Local Artist, powered by OÖ Kulturquartier

FETISH FINGER von/by Susanna Flock Jurystatement

Medienbilder des Selbst sind die Fetische der digitalen Kultur. Sei es die eigene Katze, der zur optimierbaren Oberfläche mutierte Körper oder der Kochtopf – sie alle dienen der Subjektkultur des Selfies. Mit Susanna Flocks Video FETISH FINGER scrollen wir uns langsam durch diese Bildkultur der Gegenwart. Dabei überzeugt die Inszenierung der Hand, dem Symbol für DIY-Kultur schlechthin. Sie dramatisiert, wie wir – uns selbst zum Objekt geworden – verzweifelt versuchen Kontakt zu uns aufzunehmen. Die ins Bild gesetzte Berührung der Touchscreens und unsichtbaren Interfaces verdeutlicht, wie sehr sich das Selbst an der Lücke zwischen Materialität und Virtualität abarbeitet. FETISH FINGER stellt einen poppigen, bisweilen skurrilen und vor allem erfrischend wenig moralisierenden Kommentar dieser neuen Fetischkultur dar.

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Media images of the self are the fetishes of digital culture. Whether it is one’s own cat, the body mutated into an optimizable surface, or a cooking pot – they all serve the subject culture of selfies. With Susanna Flock’s video FETISH FINGER we scroll slowly through this image culture of the present. The depiction of the hand here, the ultimate symbol of DIY culture, is especially convincing. This arrangement dramatizes how we – having become objects ourselves – desperately attempt to make contact with ourselves. The pictured touch of the touchscreen and the invisible interface illustrate how the self struggles to cope with the gap between materiality and virtuality. FETISH FINGER is a colorful, sometimes absurd and, most of all, refreshingly non-moralizing commentary on this new fetish culture.

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fetish finger by susannaflock

fetish finger combines experimental video clips, that deal with the complexity of haptic perception in the context of screen based digital media. The moving images are associatively concerned with contact at the interface between the physical and the virtual, activeness and passiveness. In addition to images, 2D and 3D animations, youtubefootage of "Food Diaries" are included. Formally, „fetish finger“ is read as if scrolling down a webpage.

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W-A-S-D

Susanna Flock

4 Channel Video Installation

A gamer, a dancer, an athlete and a stuntman imitate the death sequences of avatars from computer games through a motion karaoke. The starting point of the work is the death in computer games. It is not to be equated with an absolute end, but let’s you frequently repeat a game level as a consequence of an error. death for us means an emotional process and is always final, it is not only reversed to the contrary in computer games, but infiltrated through the medium of karaoke on another level.

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Susanna Flock Untitled

The poster subjects show texts that are taken from the Getty Images website, and have been found in certain keywords, ‚Real people _Ordinary‘, ‚Ugliness‘ and ‚Real people_Criminal‘. The search results that appear first are considered ‚best match‘ and are therefore consequentially used for the work.

„The decisive act, to withhold the imagery itself, provides space for our own imagination. Illustrations lacking in identity are transformed into narrative complexes, which are fed from a huge range of concepts and a wide world of thought, they open a mental cinema.“

Guenther Selichar on Susanna Flocks work „Untitled“

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Translation by Susanna Flock

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Susanna Flock Can One Mark This Sky

The process-oriented work „Can One Mark This Sky“ deals with the topic of sending an encrypted message via a mass media system. The Institute of Meteorology of the University of Berlin assigns names to pressure areas for Central Europe. For this project, pressure formations were baptized systematically, by browsing through name archives for semantic material that is approved by the Institute. The names used are from different cultures. They appeared from 2012-2014 on weather maps, yield together they result in the sentence: „CAN ONE MARK THIS SKY“.

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Trying to built a Sentence, Flock Susanna, 2012

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Sceneries, 2012, Susanna Flock und Leonhard Müllner

Sceneries is an acoustic collage of collected travelogues. The passengers are not walking through tangible but virtual territories that they have entered via computer games.