A light installation at the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, Paderborn, Germany
Dec 10, 2021 – Jan 09, 2022
Of course, End of Medium is a title that you have to process first when reading. It comes like a fright and like a question. Why should a medium end up here on the facade of a museum that shines in two colors? Should it be recalled that the active media production of the “Nixdorf” brand has come to an end?
But far from it. End of Medium is a control command that both machine and human have to process at their interface. Some of the first computers read their programs from a long tape, which was scanned with a delicate mechanical device and transported forward reading step by reading step. At some point, after the so-and-so command executed, the tape was over. And this very end of the program tape was announced with the machine code for End of Medium. The machine then stopped to prevent its mechanics from groping in the void and possibly taking damage; causing a crash or something similar.
This historical procedure, its spatial form and its movement, was brought to the mind of Franz John when he designed his installation End of Medium. The facade of the building is rasterized by its lense construction. An enchanting checkered three-dimensional sheet for a binary code in a programming step look.
On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (HNF), the artist Franz John took the binary equivalent of the “25” – 11001 – and visualized it with red and blue light wires in the vertical.
The light installation End of Medium works with its surroundings. Firstly, it makes the facade of the HNF a component of the staging, in that the grid of the facade acts as a representation marker of the binary 25. Secondly, it produces a sound written with the Solresol plan language and developed in cooperation with the musician Rainer Frey, which controls the light variances of the light wires. And thirdly, she points into the room with light paths that deviate from the grid, involves the viewer in mirror effects and other perceptual surprises, to a certain extent back and forth. Into the past and into the future. What’s next?
Text by Thomas Goldstrasz