MARKER – Maja Rohwetter

Marker

As part of the exhibition Marker, artist Maja Rohwetter transfers her visual worlds into an expanded dimension of reality through the interface of an augmented reality app. In a sound-immersive, walkable landscape embedded in the real space of B-Part Exhibition, the artist’s responsive animated 3D objects unfold, which have their origins in painting and collage. In the field of tension between real and digital dimensions, viewers simultaneously become users.
The exhibition title refers to a “marker” that functions as a portal to an in-between world in augmented reality: By scanning the marker, a collage on the floor in the exhibition space, the application AppARition opens the multisensory entrance into a dimension in which the boundaries between the analog and the virtual become blurred in the experience of the work. To what extent does digital space present itself to us as reality? How real is reality that is perceived via a display?
Where is the boundary between the static image within the “frame” and its temporal dimension?
Maja Rohwetter’s app AppARition was created during a three-month residency at the B-Part Studio, which, as part of B-Part Am Gleisdreieck, offers a space to artists who operate at the interface between art, new technologies, and forward-looking concepts. B-Part accompanies artists in the development of innovative artistic positions that move away from traditional concepts of art and at the same time sharpen perception for unfamiliar perspectives.
Thus, it is possible to call up Maja Rohwetter’s responsive 3D world at any location with the marker through the app: be it in the exhibition space of the B-Part Exhibition, the Park am Gleisdreieck or any other spatial situation. As an alternative to the room installation, the image of the marker can be used on the invitation card as on the banner. The AR experience thus becomes a portable exhibition that users can call up at any time and place in a different spatial and content-related context – even after the exhibition time in B-Part Exhibition. Marker invites to break with the usual reception of art in classical exhibition spaces and to enter into an artistic interaction with the urban space and the individual private space with the help of AppARition.
Not only the location in real space, but also the visual representation of the virtual world are beyond the artist’s control: the respective visual world is developed individually by all users – based on their movement in space and the interaction of reality with the 3D objects. The augmented reality presents itself to the users as spatially walkable. The exhibition lives from the participation of the visitors. Instead of a controller, one’s own body is used to navigate through the landscape of 3D objects. Marker creates a dialogue between installation and virtual dimensions.
Maja Rohwetter, whose works originally stem from painting, followed the entry of digitality into everyday life in the nineties and early twenties. In her artistic practice, this first manifested itself in digital collages, in which she created the first interferences between analog and digital space, which were then further developed in generated painting.
The genesis of the exhibition Marker can be traced back in no small part to her exploration of virtual worlds in computer games: “Navigating as an act that creates something – namely, what is seen in the moment. And also destroys it at the same time. In the virtual world, all things are always oriented to the respective viewer’s point of view. Depending on how you behave, you create different images with the app.”
The title of the work itself – contingencies – also points to the diversity of possible interpretations of these impressions. The artist refers to the definition of sociologist Niklas Luhmann, in which “contingency” is something neither necessary nor impossible – the possibility that something given, experienced, can be so, but also different than perceived. Thus, the term denies an absolute truth of reality. The possibility of otherness is always taken into account.
Marker invites us not to keep the conditioned safe distance to art objects, but to literally walk through them. And in doing so, also to question one’s own concept of appropriating the world and perceiving reality.