ECB w. Esther Stocker | Type: Invited Competition | Year: 2019 | Collaborators: Michael Knoll

The concept of the artwork explores the idea of designing systems that are a form of artistic and aesthetic expression. It thereby refers to the inherent possibilities and the aesthetic power of systems. The basis and prerequisite of all is the theory of the grid. The coordinate system collects and manages data and refers in its dimensions to characteristics of the human scale. Visitors can immerse themselves in the artwork and experience the aesthetic sensibility and spatial relation firsthand. The work is less understood as a closed form, but rather as an open process with the ability to evolve.

The physical artwork finds its addition in a digital extension; a data set in the form of an augmented reality experience. The data set is always present in the space, but invisible to the human eye. Only by using our technical devices it can be made visible and contextualises the data flux with the ordering principles of the physical and tangible installation. Data streams fluctuate from an abstract model of perception – a data cloud in its holistic presence – to specificity, representing fragments of information sourced from the mission statement of the ECB and the ECB Banking Supervision.

The presence of the data is experienced as a mixed reality - the coexistence of the physical and digital in the same space-time structure. It is ephemeral and dynamic, and its trajectories are aligned to the Cartesian order of the grid system in the physical space.