WATSCHENDISKURS

Words are one of the most powerful and at the same time one of the most feeble means of interaction. Being strictly human they are an exclusive privilege of mankind. Yet it is plain to see that words often create the problems they are supposed to solve in the first place. You can talk about everything which is at the same time very frightening and fascinating as it includes failure: You can also misunderstand anything and that can evoke various unpleasant effects from silly discussions up to world war III.

The two puppets of WATSCHENDISKURS ("Face-slapping discourse") are involved in a discussion about language theory. Like in many a real life discussion they pick their phrases randomly from a pool of more or less witty statements on the topic of language including Wittgenstein-Quotes and Russian weather proverbs. From time to time this discussion gets pretty emotional, and at a point where words no longer seem to be the right tool of convincing the other one, the frog and the cat lose their temper. A slap in the face stops the opponent and gives way for another intellectual excursus about the different layers of speech.

This kind of intellectual body talk underlines the importance of the discussion that strangely enough seems to make sense, no matter in which combination the phrases are picked.

Shut up and listen!

Two Puppets, controlled by microcontrolers, connected to a Director-program that randomly gives them phrases to speak and decides when one of them stops the other one by physical servo force.

Frank Fietzek was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1960. Living in Berlin, he is a media artist and has been working as a project director at the Labor für elektronische Medien (LEM) in Hamburg and as a resident professor in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Weimar, and Berlin. Since 1983 his work has been shown in numerous personal and group exhibitions including "MultiMediale 3", ZKM Karlsruhe 1993; "Minima Media", Medienbiennale Leipzig 1994; "Today - tomorrow", Marseille, Frankreich and Osaka, Japan 1998/99, "Im Buchstabenfeld," neue galerie graz 2001; "P0es1s", Kulturforum Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 2004. Fietzek has received several grants and awards (amoung others "Ars Electronica" - Honorable Mention 1999, 2001 and a grant from the senate of Berlin, 2004) http://www.f-fietzek.de Born 1965, Uli Winters passed his studies of Fine Arts at "Hochschule für Bildende Künste" in Hamburg with distinction in 1999. He has been taking part in various personal- and group-exhibitions in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and USA. Besides the conception and production of his mechanic and electronic artpieces ("Schamanomatics") he is involved in a lot of other activities like writing columns and articles for magazines, developing cartoon-series, writing song lyrics, writing and performing for theatres and managing a company for interactive advertising. He lives in Hamburg and on the dark side of the moon. http://www.u-winters.de

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