Basel Museum fur Gegenwartskunst

Animate Me No.2 - Solo Exhibition
Basel Museum Für Gegenwartskunst
Aug. 19 - sept. 24. 2003
Curated by Philipp Kaiser

Interview August 2003

Philipp Kaiser: Your videos often look like computer games. For instance, in the two interactive works Potsdamer Platz, 2001 and Nekropolis, 2002, you use the existing structure of a game as the starting point. You are appropriating a commercially available game and use it to shift something that is a well-known pop culture phenomenon into the museum, showing it in the mode of a large-format video installation projection. Whether it is interactive or not, what sort of involvement do you want from your spectators? What is the viewers' or the players' role?

Tobias Bernstrup: I want the viewer to be inside and experience the reality of the game.

PK: In Potsdamer Platz, Nekropolis and also in the video Friedrich Passage, 2001, which is showing here, real, big-city, anonymous architects play the major parts. The new square in Berlin, La Défense in Paris or the subways are desolate and deserted. Things that could be read as critique of a city without qualities are already quite specific computer game features: in Friedrich Passage the game format suggests a hostile opponent at every end and turn. How do you deconstruct a game, and what do you find interesting about the process? And what is ultimately supposed to be left of the game?

TB: Well I never want to add my opinion in the piece, so to some people it can of course be read as a critique, to others a tribute to the artificial city, almost like Kraftwerks "Neon Lights" that I consider as a love song to the city. Rather than criticising I would just like to show the calmness and emptiness before or after the disaster.
It's a feeling I find a lot of times when playing games, when all the enemies are eliminated but I still can't find the exit or what to do next so I am just walking around in a world without any purpose. It's the same thing as getting lost in a city reality. When building the 3D-environments I use existing game editing program, But I always start from scratch, an empty big space in where I build up the architecture, import the photographic textures, add my sounds. Then I try disable as many of the original game features/functions as possible till I have a space where you can just walk around without any weapons or enemies showing up. I like to see the flat authentic photographic textures finally appear in the game. They feel real, fake and deformed at the same time just like in any reality.

PK: There are no figures in some of your games, and in others you are the only person involved. T.B. Live Tonight, 2000 shows you and an audience dancing at one of your appearances as computer-animated, clumsy figures. And at this year's Basel Art Fair you emerged from a game as an almost virtual figure to sing a gorgeous set of electronic songs placed somewhere between New Wave and Italo Disco. How do your appearances, which you call performances even though they are very like pop concerts, relate to art, and how do they relate to your video works?

TB: It's a piece of my world emerged into flesh or perhaps like being inside one of my animations. When I started combing my performances with animations or integrating myself into the videos it was a logical step for me. I had been writing and performing music in my art since 1996 and realizing it all dealt with the same ideas I wanted to link them even more together.

PK: What is the significance of music in your work?

TB: It's the atmosphere. Music was always important to me. As part of a generation constantly surrounded by music. It's like the things you wear, it defined your identity more than anything else. So when I started working around my identity music was already there. The stuff I grew up with was punk, gothic rock, heavy metal, electronic music and later I got an interest in poppier and more danceable songs. I think it's a lot different for an artist to write her own music than to just use existing soundtracks, it becomes so much more personal. So my music is really an important part of my work.

PK: You appear in make up and leather costumes in your videos and your performances. I am interested in this context in how much sexual desire is linked with computer animation as such. Isn't every animation something like construction of an ideal cosmos, and thus expresses desire?. So can it be that sexual desire is to be understood metaphorically in your videos, and that it is above all directed at the medium reflexively?

TB: Well I could agree that the digital medium can give a possibility to explore or express desires. But it also gives us a possibility to explore and break borders concerning our identity or gender. Take the avatar for example or games such Tomb Raider with it's female character Lara Croft, of course it's created by men and for men with voyeuristic purposes that we already know, but at the same time it also shows the desire for them actually to be a woman when playing.

PK: The body in your videos is actually neither male nor female. On a second look, the sexual characteristics quickly melt away and dissolve in a virtual reality of Cyborgs. What sex is the Tobias Bernstrup art figure in fact?

TB: I am a digital lesbian. But I don't know my sex.