Nemo Nonnenmacher
“I like the idea of the virtual aspect in my practice being a prototypical, preliminary one. The virtual is not the starting point, but one of the main realms I would place my process in.”
Interview by: Issey Scott
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I grew up in Dortmund, in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area in North Rhine Westphalia, Germany. The city is famous for its beer, football and its struggle with a past in coal mining and heavy industries, which might explain the tendency for my escapist behaviour and love for fantastic narratives from very early on. As a teenager I immersed myself in the promise of the internet and got obsessed with organising local area network parties for multiplayer gaming, file sharing and digital world-building. After attending courses in Psychology for a very short time and being deterred by the sheer amount of mathematics and statistics you need to grasp, I started studying Photography. In retrospect it was maybe a counterreaction to the text-based overload of highschool not living up to the utopian promises I was lured into by my 20” CRT monitor. During my BA, I got excited by the digital possibilities of the manipulated image and soon frustrated with a traditional and limited understanding of photography within art — quite arrogantly, in hindsight. I was lucky enough to receive a scholarship from The German Academic Scholarship Foundation and left the country for Great Britain (seduced by a track record of intrepid approaches to digital technologies and the ruthless understanding of data privacy with CCTV since 1960). In London I continued my studies with an MA at the Royal College of Art, which I finished in 2017. Since graduating alongside an amazing group of international artists, I work from a studio in Camberwell, South East London. After a residency in 2018 at Unit 1 Gallery | Workshop, I continued to work with the artist-run organisation as Associate Director up until now, whilst keeping on developing my practice and working on exhibitions. I am currently waiting to set up a second studio near Kalamata in Greece, but this project is on hold until travel bans are lifted.
You work a lot in print and sculpture; does the 'virtual' aspect of your practice change depending on the medium?
I like the idea of the virtual aspect in my practice being a prototypical, preliminary one. The virtual is not the starting point, but one of the main realms I would place my process in. I see the medium in which a specific work is realised in more like one of its possible realisations, representing only a singular, or a set of qualities the virtual 'version' could find an expression in. In that way, all my works, whether they happen to be sculpture, installation or print, relate to that same virtual space the work exists in in the first place.
I like how this relates to the update-character of technological systems, but also liberates you from the idiosyncrasies of working towards a finished, romantic idea of a masterpiece.
Of course, every medium then has its own relationship to digital space, and there are only so many qualities a medium can represent. I’d rather say I curate which medium is most suitable for one aspect of the virtual and go from there. This results in some virtual works having more iterations than one, multiple versions in multiple media, which also allows me to revisit one and the same ‘original’ material again and again.
Hand II, 2017
Hand I, 2017
In the times we are currently living in, during a global pandemic, the lack of physical trace in your work is ever more intriguing. How do you see this developing? Will there ever be a time where you will not need to put any labour into your work?
I think we live in a time where we realise that physical traces do not necessarily impact what happens in virtual spaces. Rather the opposite seems true — qualities and conditions of virtual infrastructures and materials have a direct influence on how we shape our daily lives. Hito Steyerl writes in Wretched of the Screen that the more we try to represent virtually, the more we vanish from physical reality. If that was true, the world will soon be a very empty place. I am looking forward to seeing works finding their origin in conversation and collaboration with others, the potential of the in between, and from its circulation rather than a static, physical trace.
However, imagining not putting in any physical labour into my work is challenging, as I am using sculpture to reinterpret digital processes. Investigating the difference between tracing the gesture of the hand and an interpretation of a set of algorithms, has been necessary for reflecting on the loss of agency that comes with using automated and algorithmic tools.
Virtual Reality is a playground for that and I am playing with ideas of how to transfer the physical necessity of parts of my work into the Virtual without losing their reflective character within my practice. I am observing things like VR Chat or other interactive platforms that strive for the experiential framework to be user-generated and kind of open-source, proposing various departure points for realising works in a non-exhibition, non-spacious and thus ultimately non-physical way.
The shapes you create are often very aesthetically pleasing, how do these figures come to being?
Seduction plays an important role in how I treat the materials I work with. I remember the excitement growing up with the hope of the new millennium and the utopia that came with the internet and social media. The enthusiasm of Science Fiction and Fantasy up until the 90s echoes in what we harvest today. I am thinking about Neuromancer by William Gibson, Otherland by Tad Williams or Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, who all built fascinating and beautiful worlds, but always managed to point towards the crushing and deeply relevant flipside of their power and utilisation by the human character. I am trying to keep this in mind, whilst working with handmade 3D scans, photogrammetry or found footage from the many databases and open source projects online. Many are derived from the human body, both inside and outside, artistic interpretations, or scientific research material intended for real-life and medical use. I like the idea of the human body being the platform from which we can create a new world, experience it in a way that we did not think about before. I experiment with a lot of different digital tools, conventional 3D software, but also some very flawed, early programmes that don’t work in the way they were intended anymore. This sometimes let’s me discover and explore those objects through surfaces and takes away some of the control we usually associate with these kinds of tools.
Main Crispée, 2019
Miniature I, 2018
Miniature I, 2018, Installation View, Southern Navigators, arebyte Studios, London
How do you go about naming your work?
I like the idea of a strip of words contextualising the conditions of where and how an artwork was made, what constitutes it and its requirements for reproduction. These words would describe very precisely the dimensions, both physical as well as digital, locations, IP addresses and machines it had been edited on, as well as other, quite technical descriptors. Looking at how my work was rooted in photography for the majority of my studies, influenced at that time by the Dusseldorf school of photography by location, or artists like Christopher Williams, I can definitely see where that comes from. Now I am working slightly differently and across several media; the works in their character are more like prototypes, and outside their hermetic medium-specificity. I try to associate them with their bodily origin, whilst keeping their qualities as immaterial, variable virtuality in mind. The rather cryptic results being titles like miniature, all skills, even the most abstract, begin as bodily practices or the more playful Inside and Outside are both intimate, they always ready to be reversed — a quote from a passage about how human imagination mirrors the infinity of the physical and rational space from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
We visited friends in Glasgow last year and saw Cécile B. Evans‘ installation Amos‘ World at the Tramway. We spent 4 hours there and completely immersed ourselves. The work is a massive three-part installation and video work — a fictional TV show set in a utopian housing estate borrowed from Ballard‘s High Rise. It is an incredible piece about human emotions in an overly networked society and mirrors very sensitively the digital infrastructure of our lives — the utopian dream of the systems‘ white male architect. I remember seeing her show Sprung a Leak at Tate Liverpool in 2016 — also a great work about technology and the relationship between humans and machines — and whilst it amazed me in the intelligent use of digital screens, robots and the stage itself, Amos’ World struck me in its subtleness and the different roles and experiences one tapped in as a viewer. I think I have never spent that much time with a video installation and I definitely recommend seeing it, should the work be shown somewhere else.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I am currently participating in a project called Authentic Spaces, a residency and exhibition programme focusing on Virtual Reality, organised by the Leipzig-based media collective THIS IS FAKE. The project is taking place throughout this year, with a communal residency in September in Zeitz, Germany. During the stay, I will be working with a diverse group of artists on a collaborative piece in and around Virtual Reality, which in itself is already quite exciting. Coinciding with the current focus on digital infrastructures and home-office based work, the run up to the residency was planned as a digital phase: to work on various approaches for the collaboration prior to the stay in Zeitz through regular online sessions and — by means of a digital archive and sketchboards — engage in a virtual exchange between the participants, which will flow into the production phase in September. As you can imagine, I am very much looking forward to investigating how collaborative work in a digital environment manifests itself, to explore how my practice will develop from there and how this first ‘real’ and collaborative VR exploration will look like, when it will be presented later in 2020 and shown in 2021.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 29/04/20
