In the series HMKV Video of the Month, HMKV presents current video works by international artists for the duration of one month each – selected by Inke Arns.
Stefani Glauber: ECHO ELIZA ALEXA
HMKV Video of the Month
On view 1 – 28 February 2019
What do Echo, Eliza and Alexa have in common? All three are names of so-called systematically responding women whom Stefani Glauber (born in Munich in 1991, graduated at the KHM in Cologne in 2018) came across during her research in Greek mythology, the beginnings of computer programming in the 1960s and at online mail order companies of the present time: Echo describes the nymph who, deprived of her own language, can only repeat the last words addressed to her, ELIZA is a computer language program that for the first time attempted natural communication between man and machine, and Alexa is a cloud-based language assistant at Amazon. In her most recent video, sound and graphic works, the artist brings together in a very subtle and objective way the modes of operation of these increasingly complex linguistic figures, which have passed through the history of mankind and technology, and examines their (sometimes female) forms of existence between nymph and cyborg: "Echo and internet - what great analogy!" It is these analogies and juxtapositions between man, object and system, the interfaces between the physical and the digital, that interest Glauber. (Excerpt from the jury's statement on the NRW Prize for Media Art, 2018)