Wolfgang Staehle

Wolfgang Staehle is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001. He also captured the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center.

Education

Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950, and studied at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart. In 1976, he moved to New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts.

Life and work

After getting his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he worked as a video artist, and in 1991, he founded The Thing.[1] The Thing was an Internet forum for new media art. It started out as an independent media project that began as a bulletin board system (BBS) that later became an online forum for artists and cultural theorists to exchange ideas. By the late 1990s, The Thing grew into a successful online community and began hosting artists' websites. It also includes a mailing list and was the first Website devoted to net.art, bbs.thing.net.[2]

In 1996, he started his series of live online video streams. His first series is called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing’s office located in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. This project was a reference to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire which was a silent, eight-hour-long black-and-white film in which the camera focused on the Empire State Building from dusk until dawn.[3]

Staehle has continued working on his series of live online video streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest. Staehle currently serves as the Executive Director of The Thing and is represented by the Postmasters Gallery in New York.[4]

Notable projects

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1993
1996
2000
2001
2004

Group exhibitions

2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007

Footnotes

  1. Dieter Daniels, Gunther Reisinger (Eds.) “Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art”, Sternberg. 2010.
  2. "Staehle's Resume". Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  3. Dieter Daniels, Gunther Reisinger (Eds.) “Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art”, Sternberg. 2010.
  4. Tribe, Mark; Jana,Reena (2007). New Media Art. Germany: Taschen. p. 90. ISBN 978-3-8228-3041-3.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/20/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.