BREMEN.- The work of Timo Seber links cultural and social phenomena with personal experience to create stories about the manner in which we perceive the world.
Developed especially for the
GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, his exhibition TWITCH takes its cue from contemporary video game culture and the live streaming of gaming tournaments, which now attract millions of spectators. While the community identified in the exhibition’s title – one of gaming culture’s most popular online platforms – is more widely known to younger audiences, it references a phenomenon that is set to spill over into mass media culture. It acts on a global, digital level with predominantly young adults and teens where the parameters that commonly define the conventions of our interpersonal communication and notions of success – sex, ethnic/social background and appearance – seemingly have little currency. TWITCH stands for the utopia of a society that is willing to break with the familiar conventions of social intercourse in order to seek out new forms.
At the same moment the exhibition describes a cultural shift in both the nature of sport and our apprehension of the body. The participants in the gaming tournaments are of an age in which we are forced as individuals to confront our bodies and our corporeal existence. In the case of the currently most popular video game, participants at major tournaments don team shirts as they square off in teams of five to compete for millions of dollars in prize money. Tricots, tournaments and prize money are common attributes of competitive sporting events and the contest of physical ability. However the body does not play a role here. This is not a test of physical prowess. Instead, the contestants sit at their computers, isolated in soundproof glass cabins, still but for their racing brains and hands.
Taking its inspiration from this cultural phenomenon, TWITCH will present “a makeshift training room of sorts” (Timo Seber), the antechamber to a world in which success is no longer a matter of physical advantage, sex or ethnic/social background. Within we find climbing ropes reminiscent of a high school gym hall dispersed about the room in a sculptural presentation with screenshots from video games tethered to their leather-tipped ends. They are combined with leather t-shirts sporting digital prints. Akin to a type of armour in appearance, these items of apparel might also be mere merchandise and serve as reminders of the ubiquity of commercialization. Like bodies, a series of eye-catching futuristic air-beds stand upright against the wall, pinned in place by large plates of glass whose surfaces are adorned with images of computer mice. Adopting an approach that is at once cool and intriguing, Seber translates the visual idiom of the Internet into a material vocabulary that references such collective experiences as school sports programs and camping trips with air-beds.
The exhibition is framed by and opens with a work that places its diverse components within a context which is both historical and personal in nature. The work presents a blown-up photograph of the artist’s father as a child. Flanked by two friends, he is seated at a typewriter with a look of rapture on his face. The artefact locates the exhibition within the context of our age-old fascination with technological progress and the yearning for a better world to which technology speaks, making promises which – in hindsight – it has rarely delivered upon.
Timo Seber (*1984) was born in Cologne and studied at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne under Marcel Odenbach and Johannes Wohnseifer. He has previously exhibited at the Bonner Kunstverein, the Tobias Naehring Gallery or with Schmidt & Handrup. He lives in Berlin.
