This is an unpublished project premiered today on C41 Magazine.
Thomas Steineder’s work deals with what’s mundane – from the gestural in the space to the spatial gesture. With humor and irony, he relates and transforms his immediate surroundings. He plays with the different levels of representation, creating spatial performed images capable of translating relationships between body, subjects and space, while also addressing collective memories.
Site-specific interventions could be performing a sea border, spatial gestures such as cleaning with a broom, or walking with some duct tape shoes. These performances, gestures and thoughts are captured on analog film and mixed up with digital manipulations and expansions of the scanned negatives. Combining associations with conditions of the scenery, are used to produce some altered reality similar to daydreaming or expanded memories of something.
The every day as a situation, physically constructed and thought, is like a piece of dough. Images should not freeze but defrost.
About ‘Algorithmic Walking’ – words by Thomas Steineder:
‘Algorithmic Walking’ is an artistic walk of an accidentally found algorithmic route. The work focuses on the construction of images that refer to my subjectively lived, experienced and perceived landscape, as a walker, drawn on-site and out of my memories.
After discovering the “situationist international” and examining their theories of the “derivè” and “psycho-geography”, I accidentally found myself at a train station where the public transportation ticket loses its validity. I got out of the train and searched for an algorithmic route, on Google Maps, which I could follow to the next train station where the public transportation ticket reaches its limitation. I walked this special algorithm, which could be described as the border of the public transportation system of Vienna, once around the whole city.
At these walks my physical and psychological exploration went on from a geo to an ego-graphy of places, soils, thoughts and imaginations I had along the way. Coming from a background in which I first studied geography, before switching to photography, I always felt the need to put an investigation area, or let’s say space in general, into a less indexical form than the one of a map. When studying I took soil samples, described space from aerial photographs or simply evaluated a scenery via a field study. All of it had the goal to represent a particular space as exactly and truthful as possible.
The images I created for this series are very different from that approach. Having all this information in my toolbox, I wanted to describe space as out of my memories, playing eith associations and emotions. The images are mostly altered, either in front of the camera, or after scanning the MF-Negative on the computer. I also used paper-duct tape to take surface samples with my feet for example, or to represent a thought, a triggered memory or just an imagination. With that, I want to reflect my perception of a scenery and the memories that stayed after I walked a section.
