Editorial
Dear friends of Media Art
The Art Foundation Pax is a Swiss foundation dedicated to the promotion and support of Swiss media art. Since 2018, each year we have been acquiring works from the artists honored with the Pax Art Award.
Now, at last, the moment has arrived: for the first time, we are presenting eight works from our collection at Atelier Mondial.
Curated by Yulia Fisch, Echoes of the Present – Choose Your Reality presents contemporary media art as a space of resonance with our time and with the technological world that shapes it. The works serve both as archives of the digital age and as glimpses into possible futures.
I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to the HEK team, and in particular to Sabine Himmelsbach, Director of HEK and Board Member of the Art Foundation Pax, to Fausto De Lorenzo, Board Member of the Art Foundation Pax, and to Peter Kappler, CEO of Pax, for their outstanding support of the Art Foundation Pax. It is an honor to count them among our valued partners.
Take a stroll through the exhibition and immerse yourself in the works. I wish you an inspiring visit.
With kind regards
Nicolas C. Bopp
Chairman of the Foundation Board Art Foundation Pax
Echoes of the Present. Choose your reality
Media Art in a World Shaped by Code
Collection Art Foundation Pax Curated by Yulia Fisch
How do we make our choices and what impacts them? In which way do digital systems affect our freedom of choice? Is it possible for a collection of media art to make the process of decision-making more transparent and comprehensible?
The first exhibition of the Art Foundation Pax collection presents contemporary media art as a space for reflection on our present and our relationship with the technological world. The media art works appear as archives of a digital age – they preserve what shapes our time while also envisioning possible futures. The exhibition takes a critical look at how Individual freedom of choice is shaped and constrained by technological structures.
In a world where AI and algorithms determine what we see, feel, buy, or believe, the very act of choosing is called into question. Here, the realm of interplay unfolds as a walk-through system: visitors explore the exhibition playfully and interactively, navigating by responding to the questions.
Echoes of the Present understands media art as an active component of digital contemporaneity. The works address changing images of the body, machine-generated identities, surveillance technologies, and speculative futures. The exhibition makes visible how deeply our present is already shaped by automated decision-making systems – and how collections like that of the Art Foundation Pax can help to critically examine these developments, to question, or to make it more tangible. What remains is an echo of the present – in images, in codes, and in decisions – and the question of how much of what we call reality we have actually chosen ourselves.
A binary decision tree guides you through the exhibition. Depending on the choices you make, you are confronted with different works and themes. Each answer opens a new path. Each choice changes the access.
Do you trust the Internet?
YES
[ 1 ]
!Mediengruppe Bitnik
Ashley Madison Angels at Work, 2017
Five-channel video installation, sound, 11:23 min. loop
The installation Ashley Madison Angels at Work engages with the scandal surrounding the Canadian online dating service Ashley Madison, aimed at married people seeking an affair. A data leak revealed that behind many of the female profiles were hiding more than 75,000 chatbots, luring users into intimate conversations and faking online relationships. The work addresses our longing for intimacy and relationships, as well as our trust in the internet – a trust that today can be exploited and manipulated by machines.
The installation stages encounters with chatbots, whose programming and presentation vary by location. The audience is greeted by avatars with seductive questions such as “U busy?” or “What brings you here?” and thereafter drawn into conversation. As chatbots become more embedded in our daily lives and interaction, the line between human and machine grows harder to discern. To what extent, we want to and can still trust the internet? What secrets might we still be able to keep from it?
The “Not-Media Group Bitnik” (as the name is pronounced), Carmen Weisskopf (Switzerland, *1976) and Domagoj Smoljo (Croatia, *1979), live and work in Berlin.
NO
[ 2 ]
Félicien Goguey
Masquerade, 2015/2016
Software-based installation
Beginning in 2015, surveillance systems have expanded significantly – reaching as far as at the level of internet providers, where they are used to read, block, or filter data traffic. Aimed to contribute to the security, these technologies become the instruments of control and censorship. With the development of AI, so-called “Deep Packet Inspection” has reached a new dimension: today, it can penetrate information and even read encrypted data patterns, videos, and images.
Félicien Goguey develops a digital tool that could counteract the pervasive effects of mass control on the net. Small devices, called “masqs”, connect to the internet and automatically send messages to other “masqs”. Each message contains word combinations that surveillance systems classify as alarming. The large volume of such messages overloads these systems and reduces their efficiency.
How aware are we that we have no protection from the monitoring of our chats, messages, and searches online? How can we resist and create countermeasures against mass surveillance? Are we ready to choose collective camouflage?
Félicien Goguey (* 1992) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
Do you believe what you see?
YES
[ 3 ]
Studer/van den Berg
Passage #5: Beeline, 2017
Interactive video installation
Passage #5: Beeline is the fifth iteration of an interactive video installation that explores different layers of reality and perception. “Beeline” literally means “to fly like a bee” – the direct route between two points. In nature, however, a bee rarely flies in a straight line: its path is winding, erratic, and full of deviations. Similarly, our memory connects fragments of reality, recollection, and imagination into new images, producing in the end more of an associative mental map than an exact depiction of reality.
The video installation guides visitors through a sequence of imaginary places, objects, and photographs that are rendered and assembled in real time. The camera follows a programmed path while the audience can look around freely in the virtual space using a mouse. With a click, the lighting changes: from a narrow cone of a searchlight that isolates details, to a brightly lit scene.
Even though the sceneries often appear surreal, the objects refer to real templates. This deliberate mix of real and unpredictable elements raises a central question: how much can we trust our perception and our memories of places or situations, and believe what we see?
Monica Studer (*1960) and Christoph van den Berg (*1962) collaborate since 1996. They live and work in Basel, Switzerland.
NO
[ 4 ]
Chloé Delarue
TAFAA – Fertility Device (Nova Verta), 2019
Mixed-media installation
The work Fertility Device (Nova Verta) is part of a series of sculptures in which Chloé Delarue interweaves technology and nature. The title TAFAA – “Toward A Fully Automated Appearance” – comes from an article about the full automation of the stock market. It addresses the shift of natural processes increasingly being replaced or simulated by digital systems. In the sculpture, organic forms, fern leaves, and honeycomb patterns merge with cables, screens, and technical structures. This fusion recalls, on the one hand, the inseparable relationship between nature and technology; on the other hand, the organic elements appear only as artificial imprints. On a screen, a computer-generated video of falling leaves runs in an endless loop – a digital reproduction of a natural process. The boundaries between biological and artificial blur; nature becomes virtual, dissolving seamlessly into constant regeneration.
Through this simulation, Delarue points to the promises of technological systems in terms of autonomy, automation, or new worlds, while at the same time questioning how consciously we perceive the fact that our reality is shifting into endless digital territories.
Chloé Delarue (*1986) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
Is your choice really yours?
YES
[ 5 ]
Giulia Essyad
blueberry inflation.v1.2, 2021
Three lightboxes
In her series blueberry inflation, Giulia Essyad explores the extent to which contemporary body image is shaped and controlled by social media, dominant beauty ideals, and consumer culture. Through her work, the artist asks whether we still have control over our own bodies, or whether they are already subject to conditioning by a globally networked, omnipresent image system. She draws on visual references from iconic film scenes such as Willy Wonka’s “Chocolate Factory” or “Avatar”, where bodily transformations play a central role. The intense blue coloration in Essyad’s works refers both to the supernatural or alien and to the blue of the internet.
In the installation, the artist looks directly into the camera on three large-scale lightboxes, as if into a mirror, holding her smartphone as if taking a selfie. With this seemingly banal click, the body turns into a digital object – a transformation that, in the chosen color, can also be read as a symbol for reclaiming control over one’s body and its representation. Thus Essyad raises the fundamental question: does our body still truly belong to us, or has our freedom of choice already been eroded by a beauty and consumer culture that imposes its standards upon us?
Giulia Essyad (*1992) lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland.
NO
[ 6 ]
UBERMORGEN
Vote-Auction – CNN – Burden of Proof, 2000
Video, 27:08 min.
In 2000, during the U.S. presidential election campaign between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the artist duo UBERMORGEN made international headlines with their online performance Vote-Auction. Through the specially developed website vote-auction.com, they allegedly offered to sell votes to the highest bidder. The work staged the radical question: What is our vote worth – and does it really belong to us? In today’s consume-focused society, has it already become a tradable commodity? This provocative experiment exposed the tight Interweaving of democracy and capitalism and highlighted the limits of political integrity. Several states, including Missouri, Wisconsin, California, and New York, banned the website, and criminal proceedings followed. The video documents a CNN broadcast showing the intensity of the public debate at the time.
The project now reads as nearly prophetic: financially powerful interest groups and lobbying organizations shape political decisions in many countries — often lawfully, yet in effect echoing the original Vote-Auction idea. The work thus prompts us to ask again: are our vote and our choice truly free, or are they being manipulated by financial and political forces?
The artist duo UBERMORGEN, Maria Haas a.k.a. lizvlx (*1973) and Hans Bernhard (*1971), was founded in 1995. They live and work in Vienna.
Do you want to be seen?
YES
[ 7 ]
Marc Lee
Swiss Unfiltered – TikTok and the Emerging Face of Culture, 2020
Net-based installation
With his immersive installation Swiss Unfiltered – TikTok and the Emerging Face of Culture, Marc Lee explores the dynamics of social media and their influence on the way culture is performed and expressed. He takes TikTok as an example of a platform that breaks through traditional media channels and their hierarchical structures: anyone can publish a message, gain visibility, and help shape which topics receive attention.
For each exhibition venue, the work links local TikTok posts, hashtags, and profiles in real time into a vibrant, ever-changing stream of images. This creates an immediate snapshot of what concerns people in a given region – from everyday observations to sociopolitical events.
Beyond illustrating how digital content emerges and circulates, the work raises a critical question: what does it mean today to be seen and heard, and who decides which voices persist in the global flow of images?
Marc Lee (*1969) lives and works near Zurich.
NO
[ 8 ]
Jennifer Merlyn Scherler
so sad so sexy, 2021
18:45 min., mixed-media installation
In so sad so sexy, Jennifer Merlyn Scherler weaves together video, textiles, and performance into a narrative reflecting self-staging in digital space. Fan fiction becomes a stage for exploration on how identities are created, tested, and transformed in the digital realm. This realm becomes a space for collective, often anonymous imagination, creation and emancipation. In the video, Scherler appears in multiple roles, shifting between closeness and distance, vulnerability and self-assertion. The soft, body-related textiles in the space form a tactile counterworld to the cold logic of the screen: intimacy becomes visible and at the same time softly cushioned.
Thus the digital space becomes a laboratory for identity experiments. Within it, the duality between “sexy” and “sad”, between sexuality and melancholy, comes to the fore. It opens the possibility of being visible and hiding at the same time – a play between visibility and withdrawal, in which self-staging can become both a protective mechanism and a form of liberation. What does it mean today to make oneself visible without exposing oneself? And how can community be both a safe space and a stage?
Jennifer Merlyn Scherler (*1996) lives and works in Basel.