Carsten Becker

thirdness, by Tamara Branovic

Carsten Becker’s historically- and philosophically-guided works investigate established systems and codes, utilising and deciphering them, before ultimately questioning what is left of them. Carsten Becker’s multimedia long-term project Activity Tableau (2016) and Past nor Present (2016) deals with the mechanism of complete transparency and its potential for total monitoring and control.

Exhibition

Carsten Becker’s historically- and philosophically-guided works investigate established systems and codes, utilising and deciphering them, before ultimately questioning what is left of them. Carsten Becker’s multimedia long-term project Activity Tableau (2016) and Past nor Present (2016) deals with the mechanism of complete transparency and its potential for total monitoring and control. Becker’s installation includes two components: several silk screen tablets entitled Activity Tableau, and a programmed graphic presented via a website, entitled Past Nor Present.

Carsten Becker has been documenting his daily working hours since the year 2000 as a digitalised data set. Each year’s results are transferred into a pattern based on programmed vector graphics, linked to the compound elements within the colour spectrum of light, and printed as a silk screen. The pattern of Becker’s work reveals and defines itself like a thumb print. Yet it is only he who has an emotional connection to this representation of his work ethic, not the recipient. A programmed graphic image combines analogue and binary interpretations of Becker’s work. Presented in a hybrid format, the past can be experienced as a part of the present.

Research on this work led to an intensive engagement with the RAL colour matching system, implemented as the standard colour catalogue for production by the state authorities of the Weimar Republic. In this spirit, Becker’s new work Panzergrau, Sandgrau, Dunkelgelb (2017) utilises the colours black grey (the paint on German tanks at the beginning of World War II, catalogued as RAL colour 7021/46), sand grey (the colour of German camouflage in Africa, removed from the RAL catalogue), and dark yellow (the first colour used for German infrared camouflage; numberless for reasons of state secrecy) in his triptych as part of his historical series on colour analysis.

thirdness

Tamara Branovic, 2017