My artistic and literary projects are located in contemporary information-wonderland. The common thread of all projects can best be described as ‘the never-ending human obsession to create and destroy reality’. All projects examine the dynamics in a symbolic triangle formed by technical developments, subjective perception and 'official' reality. I work at the interface of artistic research, documentation and (visual) storytelling. Text, sound and (moving) images are the basis for my installations and publications.
Cybionic Trilogy - Science Fiction Trilogy, pubished 2021-2023 @Polarise Verlag Heidelberg, Germany
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»Reality is just a possibility« Cybionic is a Near Future SciFi about the symbiosis of humans and an algorithmic intelligence. A borderwalk between reality and science fiction.
CineTube - media literacy program in Rotterdam Zuid
co-operation of Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt — 2012-2015
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Cinetube aims to initiate and empower media literacy for children and teenagers of different cultural
backgrounds, in the age between 6 and 22. The education program is teaching them to understand
media better, so they can participate in a more conscious and critical way. One example of
workshops developed for Cinetube was the TV serie Girl Problems (broadcasted on Open Rotterdam
and in LantarenVenster): This edutainment program covers typical topics teenage girls struggle
with. The complete production of four episodes were written, acted, edited and filmed by young
people living in Rotterdam Zuid, assisted by professionals and coaches. How does the Islamic Soraya
deal with the fact that she is in love with a Dutch boy while her family is preparing for marriage with
another boy? Or how is Mandy doing, experimenting with drugs and getting addicted? Girl Problems
uses edutainment (education and entertainment) as a way to inform, empower and contribute to
personal and talent development. Through the series, problems and dilemmas of young girls were
made visible, negotiable and tangible through a fictional narrative.
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Girl Problems was a collaboration between Cinetube (Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt) R-newt, SKVR
and De Verre Bergen.
Pyjamocracy: How Snapshots Confuse our Lives - Video installation and publication: For the first time in history the majority of all existing images is made by amateurs. On December 30, 2006 I saw the execution of Saddam Hussein, probably like everybody who watches news on TV or surfs the Internet regularly. The next morning the same pictures were also lying on my doormat, published on the first page of my daily newspaper. It was almost impossible to avoid them. What fascinated me most about those images was not the following discussion whether it is bad taste or ethnically incorrect to show pictures like that, but simply the fact that those pictures were made by a mobile phone of an anonymous attendee during the execution, and that they rapidly started their way into living rooms worldwide via the Internet. This marked a new epoch of images for me: the epoch in which amateur snapshots finally intervene with an until then unknown vehemence into power-struggles, news, professional propaganda and thereby the human perception of reality. There had been other incidents before when amateur footage was used in the traditional media, for example the pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison, a snapshot of the murdered Theo van Gogh, 9/11, the London tube bombing and other terror attacks. But the exclusivity and the impact of the Saddam pictures caught my attention. Were those pictures really made and put online secretly, and so leaked into the traditional media and our consciousness seemingly incidentally, or were they actually commissioned and just a smart part of the official propaganda strategy? They look like typical amateur images, but maybe they aren’t. We will probably never know.
Dias de Reclusão - Art and literature anthology 2020
Publisher: Maria Vieira, São Paulo, Brazil ISBN: 978-65-88333-00-6
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The project 'Isolation Days' unites well-known and less well-known artists from 5 continents for a common goal: We use our art to financially support three organizations in Brazil and Mozambique which help people who are facing existential problems due to COVID-19. The anthology is sold worldwide and we organized several global online meet-ups and social media activities to draw attention to the problems caused by COVID-19 in the poorest countries. Next to that we hope to promote the boundless power of art as source of hope and beauty.
For the anthology I wrote the SciFi short story 'Algina' and participated in various online events.
Blokmapping - Blokmapping
artist Book, exhibition, online archive
co-operation of Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt 2010-2012
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Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt’s Blokmapping documents their home neighborhood – the
Hillesluis area of Rotterdam – in great detail. Eggers and Anhalt inventoried every rubbish bin, tree,
lamppost, paving stone, resident and car within a radius of 333 meters of their home (in a street
called Blokweg). Searching on Google produced a range of archive material from local newspapers,
Hyves (a Dutchsocial networking site) and company registers. The bare facts were soon enriched by
juicy anecdotes from local residents. The vast amount of material – 12,000 items, including statistics,
facts and personal stories on what it means to live in a deprived neighborhood – was placed on a
website (www.blokmapping.net) and published in a hefty tome. Eggers and Anhalt call their method
“extreme mapping”. They use this way of surveying a small area in enormous depth so as to record
and interpret the far-reaching changes occurring in society.
Lichtwolke - Interactive video installation and lecture co-operation of Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt
Dutch Photography Museum 2009-2010
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Imagine that you could decide what you look at yourself. Or do you think you do that already? Imagine: a film of Chinese women dancing for Mao or tourists visiting the Statue of Liberty in New York, the vice squad arrests someone, a girl mounts a bicycle. As you view this collection of projections you hear the steady sound of a slide projector. East Germany. Click. A family snapshot of a bedroom. Click. The same place, now empty. Click. Notes from the police. Click.
The “Light Cloud” installation is a collection of historic and contemporary amateur materials, each of which examining the phenomenon of “power”. Meike Eggers and Michael Anhalt are fascinated by the chaos of images – from countless authors – that inundate us. Often, a clear boundary between the manufactures and consumers of images and their origin and meaning can no longer be distinguished, making images free for interpretation, aimless and easy to abuse. They no longer follow a set interpretation of reality or a collective “truth”. Our perception of the world is no longer exclusively constructed by those who have the power, but by everyone. We have all become makers of reality.
“Light Cloud” is composed of nine projections combining photography and film. The visitors subconsciously influence the images by movement detectors that guide the films and photos. The projections change location and form new combinations with every movement of the viewer. The only refuge in the chaos is a series of photos that are projected with an old-fashioned slide projector.
The series of photos depicts the subtle boundary between what you see and what you think you see.
