voi CesWolf Vostell, took genetic material from small flowers growing there, and then mixed
the fluids so that these two great protagonists of artistic resistance unite in the image.
Das Kapital is an endeavour. as the agenda for a work it is condemned to permanent
failure. it exists within a process of permanent adaptation, re- writing, and self-
interpretation. at this level of excess and duration that is only technologically and
economically possible with digital and electronic machines. The amount of material
would be colossal if mercado were to work in analogue media. his factory fits on a
table top. in the beginning he needed to use the massive silicon graphics machines
that only the laboratories of well- endowed institutions could afford. in recent years
he can develop and design his economy of bodies as an image economy on his own
lap(top). Thus Das Kapital also tells the history of digital image processing during
the last ten years, and how an artist has handled it. marx would have said that with
his work mercado expresses perfectly the state of the means of production. in the
beginning he archived the strands of his oratorio on digibeta made by the Japanese
sony Corporation. Today the image material is stored on external hard disks where it
can be accessed for each performance. The economy of magnetic tape, which moves
between master and slave spools, is played out.
Yunchul Kim’s self_portrait.jpg (2004)i highlighted this above: when i deal with art after the media i do not mean art that can
exist without media. such art is no longer conceivable for me. Rather, i refer to artistic
praxis that has passed through the media, but in a specific manner has left them far
behind. The effect that the media had when they were still an attraction no longer
plays an important role. The technical and media aspects of such artistic praxis are not
the essence of its attraction. media are utilized as a matter of course by artists; they are
no longer the actual sensation.
mercado’s research processes have left the media behind them in a variety of ways.
When he works in the field, he only uses technical media for documentation purposes.
herwig Weiser re- integrates the effect into the hardware and controls the material
directly. he has already forgotten the monitors and video projectors; instead, he lets
the users re- assemble the pulverized physical material with physical interfaces.^8
in this perspective the work of a young Korean artist is even more radical.
initially Yunchul Kim studied electronic music at Chugye university in seoul. he is
a programmer, computer and video artist, has created numerous performances with
computer- generated music, and realized many installations that utilize the most
advanced technology. Self_portrait.jpg is one of Kim’s most unusual works in that at first
sight it disappoints all expectations that we entertain of the work of an artist working
with advanced media. on a large sheet of finest white Japanese paper measuring 83
× 134 cm curious signs have been written, or rather painted, with great precision in
black drawing ink. Closer inspection reveals that these are not just any signs, but the
character set of the asCii code. if one were to count the characters, one would arrive
at the impressive number 58,806. in a meditation exercise that lasted three and a
half months Yunchul Kim painted the characters on the paper. every time he made a
mistake he had to start again from the beginning. The result of this almost sisyphean
task is a work with a high aesthetic appeal and a special bonus: when the characters