hubert blanz
Urban Codes – Light Diagrams
c-print on dibond, anti-reflective glass framed, Hubert Blanz, 2013–2018
Shore leaves - Digital matrix
Annette Südbeck
In Urban Codes – Light Diagrams (2013–2018), for instance, a seven-part series of works, he always combines hundreds
of shots of office towers in Downtown Chicago that he took on walks through the
city at night over several months. He chose a photo exposure that lets the
houses’ façades disappear in the darkness to a large extent, while the bright windows stand
out strongly in contrast. The photographer’s point of view looking up from the street at the building’s façade defines specific image sections and insights into the interiors. The chosen
perspectives show the offices’ ceilings with their typical neon lamps; occasionally people loom behind the
windows, more often however only the silhouette of the window frame is visible
in the brightly lit window surface. For the diagrams, the individual
photographs are arrayed next to and on top of each other and are condensed to
extensive, vivid structures. The rhythm of bright and dark windows directly
relates to the presence and absence of people working in the offices, to
workplace regulations, and the whirring restlessness and vitality of a city
that never sleeps.
The common materiality of the depicted windows represents an immediate
experiential quality from which a large semantic range can be derived. Yet the
artistic strategy’s whole complexity only reveals itself when one considers how Blanz embeds this
linkage to reality within the pattern’s dynamics. Composing the grid and its electric interaction with the documented
abundance of details in Light Diagram 01, the artist follows a special composition principle that he explains as
follows:
“With this work, I in general tried to construct the montage with only two
elements in a very reduced way and referring to Mies van der Rohe (Less is
More): a line and a point, two fundamental elements of coding.”
With the addition of motifs, also the amount of data accumulation shifts to the
centre of attention. The rows of switched on and off lights can be considered
as a visual analogy to the code that not only guarantees the functionality of
the city but, moreover, currently of our whole life. It’s the artist’s intention not only to work with digital tools, but to make the digital matrix
of our world clearly visible in his imagery. Here lies the key to understanding
the photo collages. Blanz utilizes photography’s authenticity claim and in doing so he introduces the idea of reality, only to
demonstrate that the real appears as part of the digital world and by now is
inextricably linked to it.
Abstract by Annette Südbeck from: Shore leaves in Hubert Blanz – In Search of Radiant Cities,
from p. 46, VfmK Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2022.
Translation: Jeanette Pacher, Vienna
The urban space
Petra Noll
In the photographs exhibited here, Hubert Blanz explores the “big city” as a living space, as well as the urban systems and architectures that organise
life for masses of people. The images are equally influenced by his fascination
with the functional and creative potential of cities and by references to the
shortcomings of urban structures. In the Roadshow series, he took screenshots of satellite images of real road networks,
transport hubs and bridges in various cities and “built” hundreds of images – deliberately twisted and shifted – layer by layer into confusing, deep-spatial labyrinths. The roads dominate the
space, but they are ineffective because they are not connected to each other;
they lead nowhere. A visionary image of a possible urban development is
presented, in which orientation could become difficult.
The Fifth Face 02, part of a series, is based on photos taken from different perspectives in 2012
in Chicago from viewing platforms. They refer not only to the current issue of
surveillance, but also to the lack of space in megacities: the ‘fifth façade’, the flat roof, is becoming increasingly important as additional usable space.
The chaos of buildings and the absence of people visible in the photo are
reminiscent of an urban apocalyptic scenario. The Urban Codes series was created on foot over several months in Chicago at night, in which
Blanz explores light, one of the most significant elements of the city. In each
photo, he has combined numerous illuminated office skyscrapers. The result is
an overwhelming grid-like structure of light in which each building
nevertheless has an individual aura that seems to be decoded by a kind of light
code.
Petra Noll on the exhibition Das Glück liegt auf der Straße – Urban Space,
Municipal Museum Neuötting, Germany, 2015
Translated with DeepL.com
Hubert Blanz
Ruth Horak
Hubert Blanz is the science fiction author of Austrian photography. The first Digital Surroundings were already on display in 2001 in the photo room formerly known as Volpinum.
At that time, circuit boards simulated satellite views of possible large
cities, electronic components replaced real buildings, and helicopters rattled
through the air. Since then, Hubert Blanz has been building a hyperreal
universe: satellite cities made of polystyrene (Frigolite Elemente), whose barren surroundings reinforced the impression that all life must have
long since been eradicated from them, or airport runways layered on countless
levels, or motorway intersections on just as many floors, suggesting a vertical
city layout like that of Zion, the city of the resistance fighters in The Matrix. (1)
From the internet and from digital cameras – the practice of accumulating photos seems to be the logical consequence of
having an unlimited image archive at our disposal. In view of the similarly
overwhelming number of books, Jorge Luis Borges sketched out in 1941 the total
library that would collect all books ever published in all languages. At the
end of this fantastic design, he reflected on a counter-opinion that suggested
that instead of an infinite sequence of rooms, ‘a book made up of an infinite number of infinitely thin pages’ (2) could also contain everything that had ever been written. (3) Transferred
to photography, Hubert Blanz often layers hundreds of individual images on top
of each other, culminating in virtual territories with the highest possible
degree of intensity. They are so densely packed that an explosion seems
imminent, and formally also occurs in
Virgina Sun, for example.
A certain restlessness is omnipresent when Hubert Blanz spends weeks
photographing all of Vienna's motorway bridges or walks the streets of
Manhattan from the financial district to 115th Street, house by house (4), over
a period of three months, collecting the steep views up and along the
skyscraper facades. Or most recently Chicago: the grid structure of the steel
skeleton buildings, the window divisions – his tireless gaze collects the structural modules of the city, the grids that lie over it, the urban codes that are sent out at night from the
illuminated offices. For The Fifth Face 02 (2012), Hubert Blanz takes up the view from above, as we are now familiar with
from satellite images: the result is a digital collage of roof views
photographed from the Willis Tower (5) and the John Hancock Centre. Meanwhile,
the next unusual view of yet another metropolis, this time London, is already
in the planning stages, namely ‘the big city from behind’ with the windowless front walls of all London boroughs.
Fiction always exaggerates: conceivable future developments, advancing
urbanisation, surveillance authorities, comprehensive recording of our
lifestyles, etc. are always vague, but nevertheless oriented towards the
present and derived from the now, inspired by the pursuit of our interests on
the internet, by a life spent in front of the computer, at airports, in
corridors, in lifts between floors, in office buildings at night, seen from the
perspective of satellites or maps that reduce cities to their views and street
names. All the material that Hubert Blanz processes reflects those systems that
are offered to humans as a refuge, that organise their lives. But everything is
deserted, even though it is designed for a mass of people. And at this point in
the novel, the intention of the system supervisors would be revealed: ‘Abigail, you know very well that all of humanity's problems point to there being
too many bodies developing all kinds of needs. So any rationalisation in this
area is to be welcomed.’ (6)
(1) The Matrix, 1999, directed by the Wachowski siblings.
(2) Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel in Fictions and Stories 1939–1944, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 1992, p. 76.
(3 In 2002, Sergey Brin and Larry Page wondered how long it would take to scan
all the books in the world—by 2012,
Google Books had reportedly surpassed the 20 million mark.
(4) See Helmut Weihsmann, Lost in Intermediate Space in Hubert Blanz, Slideshow, SpringerWienNewYork, 2009, p. 84.
(5) Formerly Sears Tower.
(6) David G. Compton, The Electric Crocodile, Heyne Verlag, Munich, 1982 (English original edition 1970), p. 52.
Ruth Horak on the solo exhibition Urban Codes at the Foto-Raum, Vienna, 2013
Translated with DeepL.com