In mijn praktijk als kunstenaar zet ik de technologische cultuur en haar middelen als een medium om deze van binnen uit fundamenteel te verkennen en ondervragen. Met mijn werk verken ik de wederkerige relatie tussen (technologische) cultuur en perceptie. In die zin is mijn werk politiek. Eigen ervaringen, afwegingen en intuïtie staan centraal in deze verkenning. Het kunstwerk is intrinsiek poëtisch; niet logisch, maar ana-logisch; gebaseerd op correlatie, connotatie en speculatie. Een vorm waarin het doel altijd en volledig samenvalt met de middelen. Kunst komt nooit met antwoorden maar kan voorzien in nieuwe inzichten, vergezichten en vermoedens die ver voorbij gaan aan de redelijkheid van het alledaagse.
Geert Mul Selected Works - Geert Mul
Selected Works 2023_2013
Video 12mins
One Day After Lightbox 250×175 Geert Mul 2022 - "Fotografie bijvoorbeeld, convergeert de subjectiviteit van het individu (de fotograaf achter de camera), met de culturele conventies van het zien (de camera) en het onbegrijpelijke (de wereld voor de camera)"
Underland, Lightbox 180×84 cm Geert Mul 2022 - The photographer, the camera and the world:
Every consideration in the history of art, religion and philosophy attempts to construct and consequently, relate, concepts of the Individual, Culture and the Incomprehensible.
Photography converges the subjectivity of the individual (the photographer behind the camera), embodied cultural conventions of seeing (the camera), and the incomprehensible (the world in front of the camera).
Heaven Earth Inside Out Geert Mul 2021 - Art Foundation Sint-Oedenrode assignes Geert Mul to realize four art interventions in the stairwell of the Knoptoren in Sint-Oedenrode. The religious and cultural history of the church is central to the new work, as well as religion and spiritual experience in a more general sense: imagining the relationship between ‘man’ and ‘the universe’, ‘creation’ or ‘the sublime’. For this project, Geert Mul uses various media and materials to collaborate with the local Heemkundekring.
A landscape in a church is never just a landscape. Indeed in a Christian church, heaven (and hell) is always opposed to the ‘earth’. The Christian tradition is elaborated in a linear narrative, starting with the creation, the coming of Christ as an intermediate act, the day of judgment and the afterlife as the final piece. With my landscape in the church building of the Knoptoren I connect the (monotheistic) linear approach with a circular holistic tradition of Buddhism, Shintoism, Taoism (and the great animistic- and nature religions)
ShanShui interactive installation Dortmunder-U - Geert Mul
Permanent Interactive installation
featuring 500 Shan-Shui style Chinese paintings.
Software programming: Carlo Prelz
Production assistant: Shihui Wang
Permanent Installation research: Claudia Roeck
Permanent Installation programming: TG x Thoth
地平线
Perspective is a cultural property. The history of paintings of landscapes shows us a history of perception. The relativity of perception becomes most apparent when we look at ‘the other’. And so ‘the east’ (east of what ?) can serve as an excellent point of reflection for ‘the west’ (west of what ?) and the other way around. The installations Shan-Shui and HORIZONS (https://vimeo.com/36303071) form a complementary outlook on the perception of the landscape from the west and the east.
Shan Shui is a software-based artwork created by Artist Geert Mul (Rotterdam, NL) in 2013. Amongst other exhibitions, Geert Mul exhibited it at his retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (NL) in 2016. This is the version that was imported in this gitlab repository (called version 2016 here). Carlo Prelz wrote the source code in 2013 and adapted it for the 2016 version. In 2017, Claudia Roeck applied migration and emulation strategies to Shan Shui in the scope of her PhD to research long-term preservation strategies. The resulting version is called version 2017. In 2021, Geert Mul adapted Shan Shui to exhibit it in a permanent display in Dortmund, resulting in version 2021.
Supported by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve industrie NL. Mondriaanfoundation NL and Dortmunder-U.
NATUREALLY 250cm x 250cm x18cm. - Met het werk Natureally (2017) presenteert mediakunstenaar Geert Mul een illusie van natuur en landschappelijkheid door het gebruik van artificieel licht in combinatie met bewerkte natuurbeelden. Je ziet een monumentale oude eikenboom, in een levensgroot en intens gekleurd heidelandschap. Het is een fictief landschap, dat Geert Mul creëerde uit een collage van diverse landschappen in verschillende seizoenen. De collage is gemaakt in een extreem hoge resolutie, zodat het ondanks de afmetingen (4,5 x 8 meter), van dichtbij nog altijd haarscherp is. Je ziet de nerven van ieder blaadje, de groeven in de stam worden haast tastbaar. Het maakt het landschap levensecht, maar ook herkenbaar: het voelt als een plek waar je eerder bent geweest en als een plek die leeft. Je zintuigen registreren beweging, zo subtiel dat het nauwelijk waarneembaar is, maar wel voelbaar. Verschillende onderdelen worden langzaam belicht alsof de wolken voor zon schuiven. Deze kleurverandering van licht creëert de illusie van tijd in het werk. Tijdens een anderhalf uur-durend script worden de verschillende seizoenen een-voor-een zichtbaar.
Geert Mul – Match Maker at Stedelijk Museum Schiedam 2016 / 2017 - GEERT MUL MATCH MAKER
25 years of media art 5 November 2016 – 12 February 2017
Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
The Stedelijk Museum Schiedam is the first museum in the Netherlands to present a spectacular retrospective of the work of Geert Mul (1965). Over the past 25 years, this pioneer of media art has developed a unique and all-round oeuvre of interactive audiovisual and photographic installations. Especially for this exhibition, he has made a light installation with historical pictures of this town at the Museum’s plaza.
Arrangement
The same way that a poet writes poetry with words, Mul uses images to create visual poetry. He borrows them from the Internet, for example, but to Mul they have no particular meaning in themselves. It is only when a composition emerges that they come to life. This is what makes arrangement and rearrangement his major themes. But not just to him: everyone is constantly flooded with information and images. Consequently his work evokes associations with recognizable themes and developments.
The Library of Babel
Geert Mul – Match Maker, 25 years of media art comprises several works including a large number of installations from the past 20 years. For The Library of Babel (2003), Mul drew his inspiration from the story by Jorge Luis Borges of the same name, which made a profound impression on Mul when he was 18. It is remarkable that – as early as 1941 – the Argentine writer/poet painted a picture of a world that is rather similar to our current information era. Everything can be found on the Internet, but what is usable and reliable? With The Library of Babel visitors realize a certain arrangement simply by walking ‘on’ the work of art.
Media artist
In the mid-eighties Mul brought along his own computer to the Art Academy. This was a time when the medium was scarcely out of the egg, but after 1993, with the launch of the internet browser, it received a crucial impulse. Now everyone could get access to worldwide data and images. Mul developed software to select particular images. For The Library of Babel, for example, the computer selected 100,000 random images from the Internet.
Middle East
The media have focused on the Middle East for decades and this is also reflected in Mul’s oeuvre. It is the case in Match_of_the_Day (2005), for example, for which the computer randomly selected images of TV stations that were found to be rather similar by its software. Current events have likewise found their way in the video performance Mawal For Syria, (Live in Beirut, 2015, in conjunction with Michel Banabila and Anas Maghrebi), which is part of the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
Interdisciplinary and international
Being an exponent of the sample culture of the nineties, Mul was one of the first VJs in the Netherlands. He employed various disciplines like dance, theatre and music, working with techno pioneer Speedy J, sound artist Michel Banabila, dance group Krisztina de Châtel, RO Theatre and the French National Symphony Orchestra, among others. His work is on view in museums, art fairs, festivals and in public spaces in Europe, the United States, China, South Africa, Japan and India. Mul is represented by Ron Mandos Gallery.
Top floor
The exhibition space on the top floor of the Museum includes video registrations of site-specific installations, TV portraits (Kunstuur, Art Men and others) and the TEDx-Talk held by Mul under the title How databases can be turned into art (2012).
Data-Based Art, Algorithmic Poetry Geert Mul in conversation with Eef Masson - Abstract
The award-winning media artist Geert Mul (the Netherlands, 1965) has been making computer- based artworks for over twenty-five years. A large portion of his oeuvre, and his more recent work in particular, relies heavily on existing images, often sourced online. With the help of image analysis software, Mul reworks the pictures into new combinations, attracted by the unexpected results that algorithmic operations produce, and the revelatory potential they hold. The artist refers to this work as ‘data-based art’ – a term revealing not only of his own process as a maker, but also of his take on how people today engage with the world around them and make sense of it. At the conclusion of a large-scale retrospective of his work, Eef Masson spoke with him about some of the key ingredients of his visual practice and the inextricable relations between them: information, databases and collections; randomness and rules; and crucially, makers and audiences or users. In the course of the conversation, Mul also reflected on how his work ties in with much older traditions of play, in artistic practice, with data and the rules for their recombination.
KEYWORDS: Data art; generative art; databases; image analysis; data visualization
