During the time of the collaborative exhibition project “naturalmente” – this artwork was replacing the original item in the permanent exhibition of the Leipzig Museum of Natural History.
Few months after the success of the “Last Supper” performance a premium beverage company were asking for an authentic Ad for their cultural sponsoring program. Based on the original settings of the “Last Supper” performance this still life was created to appear in a light box.
One of these light boxes was installed as part of the permanent collection at the art-gallery INTERDRUCK in Leipzig.
The work with the title “I am the doorway – Abendmahl” which you can see today describes the development of an artistic work into a product.
As a result of this development, the work manifests itself today by means of an artificial product presentation.
Every time has its own text.
The TOR software i developed articulates a text which can be exclusively read by machines. The assimilation of the text by eating symbolises, as a philosophical metaphor, belief in the truthfulness of words.
The eater acts – similarly to a scanner – as hardware, he does not understand the text.
Through the assimilation the spirit of each, equal to the software, is loaded with codified data.
We have to trust in our software.
This food is thus the only human spirit in this context – the revelation of the word during supper.
He references in this case the Christian-Western background of these images in our culture, despite all future visions.
“I am the doorway – Pork” is a variation about western countries think about agriculture as an industry. This object consists of three preserving jars – two of them containg action figures of pigs and one containing a real swine-ear and a floppy-disc with the source code of the TOR software. All contents are salted.
“I am the doorway – Pork” was a contribution to the agriEXPOcultura 2000 contest and was awarded with it’s first prize including the exhibition at EXPO 2000 in Hannover.
In 1999 the “I am the doorway” series of works had it first appearance at “Translation” Kunstförderpreis der Stadtwerke Halle. This particular work is based on the idea to find an expression for a contemporary tattoo. Artist Bernhard Schipper developed a software (TOR) what is able to encode any sentence into a threedimensional bitmap. Later on Berlin based tattoo artist Tobias Werner from Pain & Ink Dept. did the real job by getting the encoded sentence “I am the doorway” into Bernhard Schippers skin. Since the artist isn’t able to stay 24/7 in an exhibition over weeks – the artwork itself has disappeared by intention. The only proof that the artworks exists: a bloody and stained shirt what the artist was wearing after the tattoo session and a cheap framed photography of the fresh tattoo.