Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg: Vue des Alpes.
curated by Sarah Cook
How would you like to spend a relaxing summertime week in the Swiss Alps while staying at home and finishing off all the work that otherwise would be left undone? Why not get inwardly away from it all without neglecting your daily chores? Why not turn your back on congested motorways and overbooked flights during the holiday season? With Monica Studer and Christoph van den Berg's virtual Vue Des Alpes hotel, you can!
Online since summer 2001, the Vue des Alpes project gives you the opportunity to make a reservation for a digital stay of five consecutive days in a fictional room in an exclusively rendered spa hotel, situated in a stimulating, generated scenery. No traffic noise, no hordes of boisterous, fun seeking package holiday makers will disturb you in your mountainous seclusion! Book early: now taking reservations for May 2009 and later. The Hotel is normally reserved for online visitors for exclusive virtual stays of five days. The online space is not a chat room but (paradoxically) a place on the Internet you can go to get away from it all. The website also allows you to choose any date and time to check the weather at Seltengrat, a fictitious weather station, to hike the paths around the region, to ride the cable car to the summit, and to use the paddleboat on the lake.
The landscape of Gleissenhorn is entirely fictitious. Instead of photographs of actual places, only the mental images Studer/vdBerg have retained from their childhood holidays in the mountains of Switzerland have been used in the creation of the scenery. They use conventional, ready-made 3D computer software as their tool to model the objects in the scene – each rock, flower and cloud is thus hand-crafted, drawn or sculpted on the computer. Occasionally the artists also write the code for specific parts of the computer program to fit their needs, remaking the tool in the process of making the work. Comprised of over 3000 digitally generated "objects" in a database, Vue des Alpes suggests that landscape is but a collage of singly remembered elements – the line of the horizon, the shape of the leaves, the colour of the lake. (Or, in the case of a memory of a holiday in Switzerland, the well designed curve of the deckchair, the perfectly crisp angle of the snowcapped mountain).
This way of working means that the artists are able to choose particular viewpoints for the visitor to their virtual environment establishing the ideal path through the landscape. This possibility, to create experiences in the virtual world that would not be possible in the real world, brings a fantastical quality to the work. Studer/vdBerg's projects, like the holiday landscape they present, are timeless – blissfully ignorant of the ever-faster-paced computerised society of the "real" world. It is rumoured that today when images of the unspoilt Swiss mountains of our mind are needed, photographers and filmmakers head to New Zealand and shoot the less hotel-ridden Southern Alps. As today's Thomas Cook travel agency has noted, "The future of travel, it seems, is now in cyberspace."
All works in the exhibition are courtesy the artists. The artists would like to thank Nicolas Krupp Gallery, Basel.
Monica Studer (born Zurich 1960), and Christoph van den Berg (born Basel 1962) have collaborated on new media projects since 1991 and have been making Internet-based projects since 1996. Based in Basel, they recently worked with a group of designers, writers and architects ("Panorama 2000") to create "Der Berg", the Swiss pavilion at the World Exposition in Aichi, Japan, 2005. In 2004/2005 they were resident artists in the Landis & Gyr Studios in London, UK. Installations based on the Vue des Alpes project have been commissioned by museums and galleries worldwide, including: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead UK; Kunsthaus Zurich; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo; Museo Cantonale d'Arte and Museo d'Arte Moderna, Lugano; and S.M.A.K., Ghent. For other works please visit http://www.xcult.org/
See all the images used in this show.
Sarah Cook is currently the CRUMB curatorial fellow at Eyebeam and Leverhulme Early Career fellow at the University of Sunderland investigating simulation and artists' practices of presenting themselves and their work online. CRUMB (www.crumbweb.org) is a research organisation founded in 2000 which furthers the practice of curators of media art. She commissioned the new work 'Mountain Top' (2005) from Studer/vdBerg as curator of their exhibition "Package Holiday' at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. A longtime collaborator of the Banff New Media Institute and Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Canada, she misses the Rockies most of all at this time of year.
