Latest News Headlines

Uncompressed image art made possible with PIXERA

Austria – The Austrian artist Mirjam Baker was born in Melk and trained at the Royal College of Art in London. She has been the recipient of multiple international awards in the areas of painting and animation art.

In her latest solo exhibition called Dust, which ran between the 3rd October and the 21st November this year in the 'tresor' of the Bank Austria Kunstforum Wien in Vienna, analogue and digital worlds met most impressively.

A 13-minute long animation called Dust was the centrepiece of the exhibition, which was curated by Veronika Rudorfer.

Each of the 12 sequences presented was painted in a different colour, a colour film in the literal sense of the word.

The succession of hand painted individual images created a lively colour space for the beholder. All of Baker’s image compositions are concentrated around a middle line, which, at first glance, is reminiscent of a horizon. The longer visitors looked at the pulsating colour planes, the more they were able to lose themselves in deep, imagined spaces.

For the technical realisation of the visually impressive exhibition, imusee’s Abraham Ananda Bauer enlisted Gerald Herlbauer and his 4youreye team, who had previously been involved with the realisation of complex exhibition projects.

Herlbauer outlines the technical parameters surrounding Dust: “The animation film consists of numerous photographed pastel paintings, that needed to be shown in the best quality possible. First trial runs with compressed formats and a standard media player convinced us that using a Digital Projection E-Vision 11000 4K-UHD laser projector and the PIXERA media server system instead would be a much better option, since we would be able to reliably play out ultra high quality uncompressed image sequences. The difference was directly apparent and very tangible.”

Mirjam Baker herself was delighted with the final result of the media installation: “I wanted to show the film’s images in a vivid and clear way, since the details of the photographs, the visibility of the original pigments on paper, are so vital for experiencing the film. When Gerald mentioned the possibility to use uncompressed TIFFs instead of a compressed film, I absolutely wanted to try it. In addition to that, the 4K projection made it look even more fantastic, all details were visible, the notion of it being a digital medium disappeared with such fine grain images.”

Although the technological context itself was not a central topic of the exhibition, its importance was clearly a factor, as expressed by art critic Daniel Kothenschulte’s comments in his essay on the successful exhibition: “In the continuing flow of movement, the images join together to become a

complex whole; an excursus on elementary colour effects and the encounter with painting in its purest form, the colour pigment. But in order to experience this, a further element is needed, namely the light from the projection. Interposed is a high-resolution video in 4K format. This in turn makes the encounter with the actual paper images into a special event.”

photos: Mirjam Baker

4th January 2022

© 1999 - 2023 ET Press Ltd News Stories