an artist book “moments” will be published soon

Moments is the title of a digital series of works by Claudia Ungersbäck, that the artist has been working on since 2019. In Fluxus fashion, it addresses audio-visual transformation processes and formally explores the extent to which different artistic media can be transferred into the other, how they are aesthetically usable and perceptible, and where the respective limits lie in the representability and perception of image and sound . The profane copy aesthetics of the numerous black-and-white prints may initially suggest random products produced by machines, but the individual sheets are more complex than they reveal at first glance: Each picture contains several representations of different moments of reception of one's own artistic processes. You can see simple crumpled sheets of paper with text in front of a black background - although a more precise definition is required at this point, because the real point of interest here, is the foreground of the print; congruent with the glass plate of the flatbed scanner on which they are arranged. Due to the limited depth of field of the device used, the characteristic darkening of the surroundings and the impression of free-floating paper elements arise. The rows of letters on the pages are a sequence of pressed keys on the computer keyboard when it has been switched to playing music notes with an appropriate program which uses a keyboard for sound generation. There are traces of writing from the performance that came to paper in real time while making music and recall the former sound images, now printed out, only as a rudimentary score. Crumpled up into paper objects, they not only reflect the abundance of material that goes along with the multi-step translation work; they repeatedly testify to the gesture of constant discarding - random folds and creases in the paper give rise to expressive distortions, stretching and compression of the master copy; the broken text bodies underline the quotation character of the transformed pieces of music - and last but not least demonstrate the impossibility of preserving ephemeral art forms in writing. But this rejection of the drafts is by no means a negative, but is rather to be understood as a productive doubt, as a knowledge of possibilities: between inventory and improvisation, copies or printouts are continuously produced in the creative process, in which the previous image also defines the next and yet offers a range of variations. The digital copy work thus becomes a medium of synthesis, where the originality of the work of art is reaffirmed with each scan. In the foreground is the event of the interactive elaboration of an idea, not the finality of its result.

Swe Wolters