THE WORLD IS FLAT

Solo Exhibition

Hopkins Hall Gallery, Columbus/Ohio (USA)
January 10th – January 30th 2001

The World is Flat

The World is Flat

The World is Flat

The World is Flat

 

Franz John – The World is Flat

Franz John invites us to travel and thereby so­lidi­fies the flood of images of the digital world. By means of tourist sou­ve­nir cameras, which must be clas­si­cally held against the light, he leads us around the world:

From Fujiama in Japan we click to New York, take a glance at Manhattan and continue on to the South Pole. These pic­tures don’t stem from a sight-see­ing tour, but from the magic eyes of the internet, the so-called Web­cams. Franz John col­lects pas­sing, con­tin­­uous­ly re­new­ing images on a hard drive and pre­­serves these anon­y­mous glimps­es within me­chan­i­­cal toy cameras. With the click of a button, the viewer can ob­serve the world’s »digi­tal sight-see­ing high­lights« – from black night to sun­set – and be se­duced by the artist’s play­ful de­lu­sion with the par­a­dox­i­cal im­age­ry of vir­tu­al space. Let’s trav­el with him!

Text by Katia Reich due to the ex­hib­it of Franz John at Gal­lery Schüp­pen­hauer, Cologne (D), 2000. (published in paral­lel pro­gram of  the an­nual photo-fes­ti­val “Inter­natio­nale Photo­szene Cologne”)

Manhattan-Cam, Mar-14-2000. World Trade Center, New York, USA.