// new media class


Jens Tiemann — make fire!

Legacy — Winter 2021

The essence of a movement. How does our body react to an almost inanimate object, an object that makes human data seemingly visible in the form of an auto-active object. The archetypal making of a fire captured inside a machine. A kinetic reproduction of a pre-recorded movement that led to human progress - the beginning of us Homo Sapiens.

As a symbolic data collection, used sticks hang on the wall, movements previously recorded with the help of an attached gyroscopic sensor. What remains (of myself) in the fire, if I record the process of making it, remove myself as an avatar and let it perform by itself merely as a playback.

The machine carries the interpretation of human movements. The result is the cyclic friction of a rough stick tip in the hollow of a wood. I am absent and yet the fire arises. This is the first spark of my beginning exploration, a search for the meaning of our fundamental movements in order to create a sensibility for them. How to deal with artifacts that contain such fundamental data? Is this our true legacy?

This work has been exhibited at
UdK Rundgang 2022
Design and Computation @ Ars Electronica Festival 2022
SUB TEI Berlin