Thirty Six

source: portable

“You want to see the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen?” famously asks Ricky Fitts, the resident drug dealer/”psycho-boy”/tortured artist of Sam Mendes’ 1999 cult hit American Beauty. We all remember the scummy plastic bag in the wind video that followed, winning Ricky not only the heart of Jane Betts, but of repressed indie teen girls upstaged by their hotter queen bee besties the world over. Thirty Six, a site specific installation by German artist Nils Volker, gives Ricky Fitts’ plastic bag a serious run for its money. For one thing, Volker’s work has 36 of them.
Thirty Six is comprised of a mass of plastic bags which appear as a pulsating, living force as they inflate and deflate, appear and disappear, as controlled by cooling fans which are hidden from the viewer. The movement created by the bags remind us of the cyclic nature of life; the rhythmic pulsing of a beating heart, the inhalation and exhalation of lungs and a jellyfish swimming through the flowing current of the ocean are evoked.
The installation is a continuation of Volker’s previous works which have similarly transformed unlikely mediums such as garbage bags and pillow cases into objects of minimalist, mesmeric beauty which interact with the light and space of their individual environments. Thirty Six is showing as part of the exhibition ‘Rhythm’ at the Art Lab in Gnesta, Sweden until December 11th. Or you could watch the captured likeness here, but, in the word’s of Ricky Fitts, “Video’s a poor excuse, I know.”
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source: orgone-design

Thirty Six est une installation Nils Völker réalisée à base de sacs en plastique, de ventilateurs, d’aluminium, de lumière halogène, d’acier, et d’un programmateur électronique. Cette installation étrange et envoutante qui fut exposée avec des œuvres de Åsa Ersmark à l’occasion de l’exposition «Rythme» fin 2011 au Art Lab Gnesta en Suède. Hauteur de l’installation : 3 m, diamètre: de 1 à 2 m. Le nom de l’installation fait évidemment référence au nombre de modules gonflables qui la composent : trente-six.
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source: arieltecture

Bewegung in Pneus in Serie ergeben aufgrund der langsamen Bewegung nahezu einen entspannenden Eindruck. Die Erscheinung des Objektes von Nils Völker erinnert in Ihren Formen an frühe Bildschirmschoner. Zu sehen in der Art Lab in Gnesta.
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source: nilsvoelker
Nils Völker is a media artist living and working in Berlin.
In 2004 he received a diploma from the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Afterwards he moved to Berlin where he started working self employed as communication designer. Since 2010 Nils Völker creates artworks with the means of physical computing somewhere at the intersection of technology and art. During the past years he realized mostly large scale installations which have been exhibited in museums and art spaces all over the world.
In 2010 he realized an installation made from ordinary garbage bags, inflated and deflated in controlled rhythms. This work, called “One Hundred and Eight”, has been exhibited several times and has been widely published online, in books and magazines.
It was the starting point for a whole series of installations based on inflating/deflating cushions made from different materials. The largest one was made from 252 large silver cushions for the exhibition “Captured – a Homage to Light and Air” followed by further site specific commissions like “Thirty Six” for Art Lab Gnesta, “Forty Eight” for the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, “Seventy Five” for Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts in Taipei and “Eighty Eight” commissioned by the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. This installation has been adapted in 2013 as “Eighty Eight #2″ for an exhibition at the Musée de Design et d’Arts Appliqués Contemporains in Lausanne.
Besides from working on further variations of this series Nils Völker lately realized “64 CCFL”, a light installation that is mainly made from so called cold cathode fluorescent lights and “Fountains” his first public artwork that is now in permanent collection in Xixi Wetland Park in Hangzhou, China.