Paul DeMarinis: Forms, Traces, Deletions, 9 Installations 1973-2010 :: September 11 - November 7, 2010 :: Opening: September 10; 8 pm :: Edith Russ Site for Media Art, at the corner of Peterstr./Katharinenstr. (No. 23), Oldenburg, Germany.

image: Dinner at Ernie’s (Part of the installation The Edison Effect, 1993

With Paul DeMarinis’s Forms, Traces, Deletions the Edith Russ Site for Media Art presents the first retrospective of the American artist which features important works from the 1970s to current productions and thus encompasses the entirety of the artistic endeavours of this pioneer of media art. DeMarinis devotes his attention primarily to physical principles and the development of communication media. His works are often based on an aesthetic reinterpretation of existing physical phenomena and technical instruments. His objects, apparatuses and installations are his own inventions with which specific technical and scientific occurrences are made useful in a critical, humorous and poetic fashion. At the centre of the exhibition stands the 1993 installation The Edison Effect, which itself is comprised of thirteen autonomous arrangements, combinations of diverse techniques and materials assembled to form unusual audio playback devices. Several directly reference Thomas Alva Edison, whose inventiveness is given a slightly ironic homage in this piece.

In a darkened exhibition space, lasers scan old gramophone records, wax cylinders, holograms, coils, plates and phonographs records made of shellac or bee’s wax. The light reflected by these sound storage media are transformed into electric signals that are then played back on the loudspeakers. The light from the laser is controlled and altered by an old television set, goldfish or the exhibition visitors, among others.

Like The Edison Effect, DeMarinis’s eight other works in the exhibition depict an intentional “misunderstanding” of technical instruments, communication media and physical phenomena. Pieces such as Gray Matter from 1995 only function, however, when the visitors participate. In this case, by touching electrically charged objects such as a zinc bathtub, it causes them to make a sound and thus produce music. All nine exhibited works surprise, enchant and cause astonishment in the face of the potentials involved in the artistic use of technical devices and scientific phenomena.