Christoph Schwarz
Media artist, Austria | www.marcus.at
Christoph is a conceptual artist and media worker. He studied media art in Vienna and Prague and works with every-day life artefacts to tell stories about our digitalized society, such as staged press conferences, mobile phone installations, faked EU agencies and spam mails on sale in galleries. Christoph’s projects are not bound to a specific media but have an ironic approach and affection for beauty in the mundane in common.
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………………………………………European Telephone Directory
The ideal of a post-national Europe inspired this notion of a printed telephone directory in five volumes containing all EU phone numbers.
A telephone directory is the visualisation of a population, a mine of information on who lives where, and what their names are. A telephone directory is even a symbol of equality, as it makes no distinction of class, race, gender or origin. The artist aims to turn the collection of all telephone directories in Europe into a tactile piece of art, resorting all national numbers alphabetically into one new directory. In emphasising the idea of a post-national format, the only clue to a person’s country will be the dialling code of their phone number.
The artist intends to produce five volumes out of the possible total of 350, with the aim to raise questions on the necessity of the structure of a nation to create personal identity.
With kind support of the European Association of Directory Publishers (EADP).
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………………………………………….2008/SEP/19/15/23min
A video installation documenting the moments before and after an exact calculated point of no return in climate change.
The renowned Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change (Graz) predicted in their ECONCLIM study from 2006 an “irrepealable climate collapse” for the second half of 2008. Christoph Schwarz asked them to specify their prognosis for this point of no return down to a very precise moment – an unknown procedure for serious science but of course feasible to calculate. Working with the same figures, the Wegener Center came up with a precise date, hour and minute.
The small city of Biella seemed to be the ideal place to grasp this moment of no return and document its occurrence. Besides the recent years’ recession in its textile industry, the big world has no strong impact on this city, which “is a nice place to lead a moderate life at a moderate pace”. The video installation 2008/SEP/19/15/23min consists of 5 simultaneous recordings of everyday streetlife in Biella, captured exactly 3 minutes before and after the predicted point of no return – which is indicated by the cameras’ in-built date and time function, thus transforming daily routine into a shocking document of indifference.
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