There has bee one source for the basic material of my paintings over the
last years: The TV program. And I'm not about to change this right now. Only
that for my new series I limited my choice to the British Sky channels. These
channels are liable and therefore transmitted encrypted. And since Sky only
bought the transmission rights for England, there is no legal way to decode it
on the continent.
Some people just don't care that much for
legality and the internet always has been a good place to look for that kind of
guys. And down there, within the dark, virus contaminated sites, where
addresses change frequently and people use pseudonyms like "R2D2" or
"Dr. Overflow" to hide their identity, you can find some programs to
decode the Sky programs. These programs are offered for free, obviously for the
pure joy of fucking "the system" whenever you can.
All one needs is to download them and a cheap
video input card for your computer, and you will be able to watch the sky
programs on your monitor in real-time as they are transmitted over the
satellite - or kind of. Because while I adore the genius of these hackers - I
saw some of the source code, and it is really impressive - I have to say that
you end up with something that will give you a bad headache if you try to watch
it like normal TV. While the single pictures are trying to surface within their
15 something frames per second time limit, they end up in a blast of
semi-figural structures habitual. These structures are not "abstract"
in the sense of the word: The point, from where abstraction would be possible,
is the exact point they never made it to.
The feeling of abstract painting, that these
images give you, when transferred onto canvas by my homebuilt painting machine,
is hallucination, just like anything else you might be sure to recognize.
Please don't tell me you know the effect. I'm sure you do, because that is
the way we all look at the world: Trying to decode the structures.
That means: Hallucinating.