Hofstetter Kurt
* 1959 in Linz (AT)
lives and works in Vienna (AT)
Hofstetter Kurt originally hails from Linz and lives and works mainly in Vienna. As conceptual and media artist with international renown, Kurt has specialized in sound, light, computer, video, and internet installations and installs his sculptures preferably in public areas around the world.
For his Sunpendulum project, for example, he positioned twelve video cameras around the world as “eyes of time” in Tokyo, Kolkata, Hong Kong, Dubai, Azores, Ensenada, New Orleans, Cairo, Granada, Bermuda, and Hawaii. “His fACING tIME installations were based on the sky as medium for the sun’s light — time — as well as the Earth’s rotation which directs sunlight into a constant circulation of light in parallel with shadow — of day in parallel with night.”
Other installations in public space include: Planet der Pendler [Planet of commuters] with 3 time modes @ Bahnhof Landstraße Wien-Mitte, since 1993 – the first permanent video-computer-artwork in Austrian public space and experimental video work, together with Barbara Doser (Parallel Media) since 1994, which has been presented in more than 40 countries.
The catalogue Am Ereignishorizont der Ordnung was produced to accompany Hofstetter Kurt’s eponymous project, for which the artist received the Austrian National Prize, “Outstanding Artist Award 2015 – Interdisciplinarity.”
The organization “Zwei Kongruent Null – Verein zur Förderung von Projekten aus Kunst und Wissenschaft” [Two congruent zero – Association for the advancement of art and science projects] has published the catalogue that gives a first-time, comprehensive view into Hofstetter Kurt’s universe of the “irrational patterns.” The catalogue explores and discusses the lines of development between his interdisciplinary-scientific approaches and diverse authors’ methods from art and science fields. In it, it is shown how his art of irrational patterns reaches far beyond the area of visual art and experimentally forges new paths into the terrain of music composition and the motion picture (together with artist Barbara Doser under Parallel Media). Especially the super-symmetrical relationship between the irrational pattern planes of foreground and background, identified in 2015, appears to harbor a “spectacular potential” for the future.
