Art and Time - Wolfgang Staehle

The article "Art and Time" from the set text, Art History introduces the topic of time by familiarising us with the notion of Reel Time vs Real Time. This refers to 'real time' cinema, when a film unfolds in the same amount of time as the events it represents. The chapter then goes on to give us brief bibliographies about various video and photography artists and their works from the 20th and 21st Centuries, such as Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, Andy Warhol and Wolfgang Staehle, just to name a few.

Wolfgang Staehle is a German video artist who is recognised as a pioneer of the internet art scene. He's most recent works explore the dynamics, sensations and implications of connectivity. They focus on large-scale, real time video projections from locations around the world, offering an instantaneous compression of time and space.

After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Staehle founded 'The Thing,' which was an internet forum for new media art. It started out as an independent media project that began as a bulletin board system (BBS) that later became an online forum for artists and cultural theorists to exchange ideas.

In one of Staehle's works, "Empire 24/7", the camera took a picture every four seconds of the Empire State Building in New York, and the images were then sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Germany. This particular work was inspired by Andy Warhol's "Empire" in which he demonstrated 'real time' by filming the Empire State building non stop for 8 hours. Unlike Warhol's work, however, Staehle's provides the antidote of a reflective slowdown of beautiful images, close and far away, static and changing at the same time.

"Empire 24/7" 1999 by Wolfgang Staehle