Lexichaos as Confusion and Enrichment P ro f . D r. H o r s t B re d e k a m p
The Hamburg momentum Stephan von Huene’s installation Lexichaos was first shown underneath the cupola of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle. It was a great moment when the circular hall filled with people, the babble of their voices rising, and then three towers with their organ pipes, reminiscent of stalagmites, ensembles of abstract skyscrapers, began to interact with those present. This memorable situation also provided a specific moment for Hamburg’s cultural history, as the artist interacted perfectly with the Kunsthalle’s unforgotten director, Werner Hofmann.¹ I had first met Stephan von Huene through Petra Kipphoff and later encountered him again at several events organized by Klaus Peter Dencker, himself a major visual-textual artist, on behalf of Hamburg’s department of culture.² These events brought together people interested in the relationship between art, technology, and new media in the broadest sense. These connections led to the now-legendary symposium Interface 1, where scientists and artists such as Josef Weizenbaum, Friedrich Kittler, Roy Ascott, and Stephan von Huene met to discuss the possibilities and problems of electronic art.³ In 1993 these impulses eventually resulted in the then most significant undertaking within the context of art and technology apart from the leading Ars Electronica in Linz: Hamburg’s Mediale.⁴ It was an almost hysterically optimistic time, when utopias fueled by technology rocketed skywards: the book seemed to have reached the end of its reign, painting had already disappeared, even if a few living fossils still wielded paintbrushes. Art in and of itself seemed little more than an atavistic relic. Art historians had a hard time amidst this heady ambiance of electronically-inspired new media.⁵ The futuristic furor even turned against those who approached new
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