Window Projections
"e-constellations“ by Tomas Schmit

n.b.k. Video-Forum | Window Projections

Mon, 10/16/2023 -
Sun, 10/22/2023
Goethe-Institut Montreal

The Goethe-Institut Montreal, in cooperation with the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), presents a screening programme of 20 video works from n.b.k Video-Forum’s extensive video art collection, curated by Anna Lena Seiser (Head of Collection n.b.k. Video-Forum).

The individual films will be shown for a week at a time sunset to 2:00 a.m. on the display windows of the Goethe-Institut at 1626 Boul. St-Laurent, Montréal, Québec, H2X 2T1, Canada and can be viewed on an indoor screen during the Goethe-Institut's opening hours:

e-constellations

Tomas Schmit
2004
24:59 Min.
Collection Video-Forum, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.)

The interplay of words and images is of particular importance in Tomas Schmit’s work. His late work e-constellations (2004) consists of 200 simple drawings of yellow fixed points and white connecting lines on a black background. Like a mobile, the points and lines constantly give rise to new permutations. Presented one after the other as a digital slide show, they function like a “school of seeing” and are titled by the artist with English terms in a process reminiscent of puzzle games and the interpretation of constellations. Schmit recorded the audio track to e-constellations in one take in his apartment on Linienstrasse 158 in Berlin. Intermittent street noises or scraps of conversation are audible in the background. E-constellations provided Schmit the impetus for a series of further works in which he used audio recordings and the computer as an imaging medium.


As a pioneer of the Fluxus movement of the 1960s, Tomas Schmit (*1943 in Wipperfürth / Germany, †2006 in Berlin) played a significant role in the radical questioning of bourgeois art and the emergence of a new aesthetic. In his artistic practice, which primarily focused on drawing from 1970 onwards, he humorously explored language, logic, paradox, biology, behavioral research, and perception, taking concrete observations of everyday life as a starting point.