Art works made with 'new' media seldom look expressly for an association with an aesthetic (theoretical) practice outside their domain. In the case of Pfaffenbichler's CD-ROM, an association is sought in minimalist and avant-garde art (Eisenstein). The interface is carefully kept austere and consists of squares and rectangles, and the whole exudes a kind of tranquillity not immediately associated with new media art. Actually, the abstract or semi-abstract series of images, which can be manipulated with simple buttons, can be seen as graphic notations, references to text. It is a study of how in the new media the range of ideas from abstract graphic arts can merge with the achievements from cinema; for this last art form is also sometimes seen as a writing medium (Joachim Paech). To maintain the purity of the study no use is made of diagonals, colour, photographic images, spatial illusion or round forms. To interact with this work is to interfere directly with a score and a scenario simultaneously. You intervene and influence chains of abstraction, graphic 'sentences'. But even so, interaction is tight and controlled and there is no way the work can be robbed by an 'adulterer' of its tranquil autonomy. The discrete bytes are kept carefully in their null dimension and tolerate no alternative contextualization. You briefly have the feeling that you can prod and play with the architecture of raw data with your index finger.
– Willem van Weelden
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Programmed by LIA
Norbert Pfaffenbichler ° 1967 Steyr, Austria
Lives and works in Vienna, Austria
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