Exhibition
Friday, Dec 3, 2010, 7 PM

Herwig Kopp

Media Artist, Wien/Berlin

MIND – THE GAP

Introduction: Sandra Manhartseder, Berlin

MIND – THE GAP is a multimedia exhibition by the artist and entrepreneur Herwig Kopp. It is dedicated to the explanatory gap: the space, the omission, the neglected, the left over, the unused, the absent – the dash that links as well as interrupts. It uses art and the findings of brain research to build – or demolish – bridges between the gaps in our thought, in our language, and in our experience.
MIND – THE GAP takes five approaches that shape visitor interaction without predetermining it: (1) collaboration (as opposed to the idea of the individual genius); (2) polysemy (as opposed to univocal interpretation); tropes (mechanisms of comprehension and communication); (4) the experience of all senses (as opposed to intellectual understanding alone); (5) feedback, motivation, learning, and repetition (to augment the resonance of its message). This framework – geared to artists, academics, and a general audience – plays with the explanatory gap, a gap that both connects and severs under the pretense of connection. The installation expands on the idea of the cadavre exquis – creating a diffuse referential system of experimental film, installation, intervention, and performance – to fulfill the horror vacui – the fear that empty spaces could be devoid of meaning.

Herwig Kopp is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he worked in new media with Peter Kogler and in concept art with Renee Green. He also completed a degree in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Vienna – an interdisciplinary program combining philosophy, medicine, biology, and psychology. Since 2007 he has worked in social art and game design, studying how people interact with and learn from the virtual and the real in the grey zone between fiction and reality.

Sandra Manhartseder studied philosophy and comparative literature in Vienna, Paris, and St. Petersburg. Her work is located at the intersection between art and philosophy and she has published variously on their relationship. One of her projects was GLITZ, a three-year international cross-genre program for contemporary art. In 2009 she received a scholarship to attend the InterArt graduate school at the FU Berlin. Her most recent essay is “Moni und Magda, Aufführungsverbot, Weil das Denken nichts zu melden hat, Feueralarm!, Nur eine Übung?” in Bernd Bösel, Eva Pudill, and Elisabeth Schäfer, ed., Denken im Affekt, (2010).

The exhibition can be visited between October 1, 2010 and February 28, 2011