I Said If is an interactive software artwork that functions as an audiovisual instrument. The application invites the user to steer the generative system, manipulating the code’s parameters to create unique visual and acoustic events.
The work was featured in the exhibition ‘Kunstmaschinen Maschinenkunst’ (Art Machines Machine Art), traveling between the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt and the Museum Tinguely in Basel. For these exhibitions, the piece was translated from the screen into a physical installation, creating a spatial audiovisual experience.
Installation at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2007)
Installation view of the interactive projection.
The Concept
Lia’s art is communication – a game with the principle of the “user”. Her working material is code, digital poetry, which no longer has anything in common with the traditional use. With numerous experiments and consciously evoked irregularities, she creates programs in an unmistakable style that trigger formal and acoustic events. On the basis of the beginning settings she provides and the possibilites thereby permitted, players can steer the course of the application themselves. Her art consequently corresponds to the idea of “creation”, the invention of a self-controlling system that evolves from an original configuration.
The work title I Said If refers to Lia’s overall artistic stance. In software code, the word “if” generally launches a monitoring of existing states that, in connection with randomness generators, permit a great number of branching developments.
Lia limits the possibilities of shaping in that system collapse is ruled out and by maintaining her own desires for the framework in which the work of art can develop. The user thereby always moves within the field of vision of her own understanding of art; but within it, he can move freely enough that his own creativity is a decisive component of the work.
Text by Joanna Render and LIA
Project Details
Year Created: 2007
Medium: Interactive and Generative Software and Sound, Installation
Museum Exhibitions
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (‘Kunstmaschinen Maschinenkunst / Art Machines Machine Art’, Oct 18, 2007 – Jan 27, 2008)
Curators: Katharina Dohm and Dr. Heinz Stahlhut
Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland (‘Kunstmaschinen Maschinenkunst / Art Machines Machine Art’, Mar 5 – Jun 29, 2008)
Curators: Katharina Dohm and Dr. Heinz Stahlhut
Publication
Maschinenbuch: Eine Sammlung zur Kultur- und Kunstgeschichte der Apparate
Scheidegger & Spiess, 2021
Ed. Gottfried Hattinger, Schlossmuseum Linz
Exhibited alongside: Jean Tinguely, Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, Rebecca Horn, Angela Bulloch, Roxy Paine, Cornelia Sollfrank, and others.
