Thorsten Bauer

Thorsten Bauer (*1975 in Elmshorn, Germany) is media artist and founder of URBANSCREEN GmbH & Co. KG. URBANSCREEN GmbH & Co. KG is an artist collective and creative company, which designs, develops and stages media art productions. The company was founded as a continuation of the 2005 established artist group “urbanscreen”, and produces media art for the international art market. Co-founders of URBANSCREEN GmbH & Co. KG are Manuel Engels and Till Botterweck.
Since the establishment of URBANSCREEN on March 27, 2008, Thorsten Bauer worked as creative director and part of the management, where he was responsible for the artistic alignment of the company, the development of new artistic formats and the artistic direction of productions. After repositioning the company in May 2015, he limited his management activities in order to focus on the artistic discussion within URBANSCREEN as well as his work as independent creative director, artist and consultant. Besides his artistic work, he occasionally participates at the international discourse and exchange in the field of “new media”. Regular talks at international symposia, teaching activities and publications complement his practical work as artist and consultant.

Synopsis

Digitalization and Identity
 
Projection mapping plays with the visual identities of architectures, alters them, comments on them and assigns them a new context for interpretation. The static appearance of the architecture is set in motion and transformed by the object into a communicative subject. Digital media change unquestioned reality and break through the static identity of our urban surfaces. Architecture becomes “Zeitkunst” .
 
The identity of our architectures is a complex social phenomenon that always reflects the attitude, zeitgeist, function or power relations of a society. In the highly accelerated social change, the question of continuity and reliable identification has become a central socio-political challenge. Projection mapping places itself artistically within this debate and becomes the visual-poetic mirror of a world that is being shaken politically and socially by increasing dynamisation.
 
How does identity construct itself in the digital age?  Can a long-term reliable identity still be asserted in exponential change?
 
The lecture attempts to shed new light on the question of individual and social identity from the artistic subjective. In the reactionary climate of a world that is increasingly oriented towards solutions that failed yesterday, the question of cohesion, identity and orientation has become the core question of the near future. Our society loses more and more the grip to define its identity in a stable way. The concept of identity slips into the right political spectrum and is flirting with retropical, nationalistic tribal thinking.
Are there solutions or models of thought that we can transfer from art to this question?