1703 Robert Lattner: New Wunderkammer of Rococo

Robert Lattner: New Wunderkammer of Rococo

Exhibited at Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre (CMC), 18 Tat Hong Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

March 2017

The exhibition New Wunderkammer of Rococo bringing together historical Rococo paintings, Robert Lettner’s digital paintings and inspiring 3D printings by students form School of Creative Media is one of the series exhibitions of or relating to Australian artist Robert Lettner’s ornamental artworks recently shown in Hong Kong.

The name of Rococo is originally from a French word rocaille, which indicates a form of ornamentation and motifs using shell-like stone or pebbles. Rococo style was developed as an artistic movement in 18th affecting many aspects of art, which represents a more jocular, florid and decorative aesthetic style comparing to classical Baroque. By using ornate elements , light colors, asymmetrical designs and shell-like curves, the themes of Rococo artworks are usually playful and witty.

Robert Lettner was a pioneer in interdisciplinary artistic research working with computer generated and ornamental structured paintings in 1990s. Inspired by his works, students from School of Creative Media in the class of Topics in Media Art led by Tobias Klein tried to expand the combination of Rococo and algorithmic motifs into the frame of 3D by realizing Rococo style with 3D printing ornaments. What would happen when Rococo meets new media technology? The exhibition gives the answer by recomposing the classic Rococo paintings with contemporary interpretation of Rococo in new media experiments— digital paintings and inspiring 3D prints. The relatively dim exhibit environment with harsh spot lighting shows a sense of depth like in the classic paintings or on a drama stage in order to highlight the displaying objects, as well as creating a mysterious environment of “wunderkammmer”. According to the curator’s statement, “wunderkammer is a German word meaning ‘cabinet of curiosities’,…It is a special place for the collection of rare, valuable, historically important or unusual objects…where all objects are perceived as curiosities”

Tobias Klein’s work Vessels of Vanitas was exhibited in this group exhibition. The work on display was partially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China.

One of the oldest cultural artifacts is vessels and urns. Created to house our bodily remains, the making of these vessels can be traced as far back as 7,000 B.C. and resonates through all cultures and geographies. The vessel’s archetypal element embeds the stories and context of its remains, allowing adoration, reflection, and worship. The object becomes narration. At the same time, the idea, shape, form, and materiality of the vessel have transformed throughout history. Within the different cultural contexts, the depicted narration changes between the deity and ascension of the immaterial to the imitation of the natural through the use of ornament. In particular, during the time of the Rococo, the formally exuberant vessels show-cased the interweaving of ornamentation and dissolving boundaries between the natural and the religious. The design allowed the lacing of the body in the later romantic adoration of nature as a deity. Today, the materiality of the human body is becoming ever more ephemeral and transient, as data models replace traditional narration in favor of medical precision. The research of the author into Magnetic Resonance Images and the translation of such hybrid body spaces creates a digital material of the actual body, a digital flesh. This dig-ital transcendence and de-materialization at the same time allow a personal and intimate encounter with the finite and at the same time the immaterial concept of vanitas—the ars moriendi and the memento mori in a culture, post the image and believe spaces of medieval times. Vessels of Vanitas is the attempt to transfer these data immaterializes with the exuberant formal language of the craftsman-ship-led design approach during the times of the Rococo. In the long history of applied arts, the innovation of tech-Untitled-1 9714/7/17 3:19 pm>1.0 Work

In the era of Rococo, all aspects of craftsmanship and design were geared together to create a total work of art. Open to different cultures, the architects and designers of Rococo have understood the value of combining technology and art into an interdisciplinary approach. Based on this interplay of forces and cultures of the Rococo, Vessels of Vanitas II examines, through design and material combinations, a new formal language, transferring methods and strategies to digital craftsmanship. The form-finding process for 3D printing of the vessels is based on 3D scanned artifacts of the Rococo and data fragments of the author’s body, which evolved through re-composition and arrangement. Thus, through re-articulating the natural motifs depicted in the Rococo and replacing, amalgamating, and re-drawing them using Magnetic Resonance Image data from the author’s body, the work can be seen as oscillating between the reproduction of a 3D scanned artifact and its interpretation into today’s mortality and data-driven soft immortality. Vessels of Vanitas is a prototype for a new data material amalgamation, articulating the idea and qualities of digital craftsmanship into a total work of art.

The exhibition opened from March 25th, 2017 to April 3rd, 2017. On the 9th floor, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Center.