Daniel Pflumm
Exhibition “Techno Worlds”

Daniel Pflumm’s preferred medium is an electrical device: the lightbox. This apparatus gets used mainly for advertising purposes. Alongside Jeff Wall, Daniel Pflumm is considered the most important cultural producer who uses the lightbox for artistic purposes – although in a completely different way. The Swiss Berliner artist creates works formed by the phenomenon of the electric. In the early 1990s, Pflumm founded “Elektro”, a techno club that became legendary because of the DJs who played there. Along with the musicians Kotai+Mo, he released noteworthy records of the early techno scene on the label Elektro Music Department. As with these musical releases, abstraction and depletion are essential stylistic devices that also appear in his visual works. Pflumm’s lightboxes are minimalist structures, characterised by a rigid technical aesthetic. Because of their luminosity, they reveal their strongest effect in darkened rooms, relating to the ambience of a techno club, where light elements often create demarcations and guide orientation.

Clear forms and bright colours are no less distinguished in his works Untitled (Abbey 2) (2000) and Untitled (montblanc) (2005), both of which can be seen in TECHNO WORLDS. The omission of information, writings and signals as seen in commercial lightboxes, however, suggests a socio-critical, anti-capitalist perspective, which Pflumm has also expressed clearly in the creation of websites such as brutalo.com and seltsam.com.

Biography

Daniel Pflumm, born in Geneva, lives and works in Berlin. He studied at the Fine Arts Columbia University, New York City and at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin. Daniel Pflumm became known through his light-boxes which dissected the logos of brand names, and through his videoloops which reduced the dramaturgy of TV commercials to their essentials. He founded a company which was listed under various names but did not produce anything but self-represenations by logos and symbols. Pflumm strips media art of its last residues of fragmentary statements and transforms it into something that can be placed within the art as well as the club context.