Solar Habitat

In collaboration with Marianne Ertl, Dirk Baecker and Kathrin Stumreich/CSUI, the remake of Heinz von Förster’s Sun Shower was initiated and installed at Lindabrunn. From a loudspeaker you can hear Dirk Baecker talking about his memory of that moment when he stood with Heinz von Förster in his garden and got to know the sun shower.

For several years, I’ve been engaged with a stationary radio transmitter installed in the California Mojave desert that captures data from its surrounding and is fueled only by the sun. The results of its measurements are transmitted via radio waves by using existing amateur radio networks.

As an electromagnetic wave, light has the same possibilities as the electromagnetic waves in technical signal conductors. These can be conducted through cables, amplified, and connected to loudspeakers converted into another wave form, namely into acoustically perceptible compressed air fluctuations.

A sculpture using the principles of thermodynamics to constantly change its shape and therefore reflect different areas of its surrounding generating a flickering distortion in the landscape. In its initial state its in its most outspread form and collects the power of the sun. The more energy it harvests the more it closes changing the angle of its mirrors. When it reaches its minimum expansion state it ventilates its power collector and folds back to its initial state to start collecting energy again.

Glass panels from the “Warmth” sculpture encapsulate a fictional, solar surface, 40cmx40cm, slumping recycled glass, 2021

My first impulse to participate in Solar Habitat was an emotional one. I felt the urge to make the corona visible in its original expression. It is the atmosphere of our sun.

It is ancient knowledge that I have found at the outside walls of houses in remote Alpine valleys as well as in indigenous communities in Northern America: weather sticks that can forecast the weather. It represents knowledge obtained through the observation of natural processes:

Temperature clock apparatus (working title) is a time indicator that uses water and its own waste heat to show the current time. This device consists of a computer mainboard, an additional copper plate for cooling the processor and an X-Y drawing unit. With the X-Y mechanism, the device writes the time on the copper plate with water. The waste heat from the processor evaporates the water on the copper plate and the machine redraws the time. https://joak.nospace.at

Installation 2021; 26 photograms on RC paper (unframed, laminated on aluminum composite panels), 2 series with 13 pieces each, size 23×30 cm, phosphorescent curved surface.

The installation shows a selection of works dealing with the translation of time into space and the use of sunlight as a sculptural material.

A black tray with water is placed on the ground. The sun reflects centrally in the water’s surface. Through the focusing tube of a device constructed by the artist, the viewer takes aim at the sun’s reflection and marks the position on the floor indicated by a plumb line.

O.T. (the dark side of) is a minimal, process-oriented intervention in a piece of meadow on the grounds of Symposium Lindabrunn. For two months, an area of about 20m2 is shaded on this piece of meadow.

The whole work holds more than what is evidently presented. Judith Fegerl’s main material – energy – is invisible. Her work combines the potential which defines energy itself.

Solada – stone sculpture, (Stone, gold. 2021)

Low-tech Magazine questions the belief in technological progress, and highlights the potential of past knowledge and technologies for designing a sustainable society. Because a web redesign was long overdue, we decided to build a low-tech website that meets our needs and abides by our principles.

Not only fireflies, but also humans and all living organisms glow. Every cell absorbs natural light and emits ultrasubtle light (biophotons). In this way, whole organisms communicate with each other at the speed of light.

Science is telling us that we need to change our lives. How should we do that? Should we allow a ‘paternalism light’, in the sense of a evidenced based environmental and climate policy, to nudge us into self-imposed docility?

suNEARth is a performative talk about radio astronomy data of the sun as a resourceful field for sonification and multi-wave imaging.