4Elements

About our art project

Sensations and their associative links with individual experiences - this is our theme.

The 4 elements earth, fire, water, air are the physical base of these sensations and are the archaic motives of our world of experience.

This important quality opens up a wide range of sensation.

For every element a pool of ideas out of various fields is created. Impressions of art, sociology, mystic, philosophy, religion, science, culture, occultism and ordinary life build individual associaton chains, dependent on the navigation.

These represent the current state of perception and manifest themselves in a threedimensional looking form which in itself is a dynamic artistic object.

Philosophy

Efficiency and control as the maxim of working processes and public communication have made sensuality vanish more and more out of everyday life.

For us this phenoma is no cause for intellectual social criticism - we consider it as a challenge. We have chosen the internet as a public working- and communication space and we think that we can very well enrich this medium.

Our aim is the stimulation of all senses, no matter whether they can be experienced physically through the computer or not. Therefore we work with associations which the user in his imagination shall complete to realistic sensations. The user is able to experience his sensations conciously and take the lingering of his senses, the digression of his mind as a profit.

In the process he will learn something about the individual way he interprets impressions, how he completes and combines them. And then of course he could take the way he looks at things simply as a snapshot.

Technology

Flash: Flash serves as a graphical frontend and for the realization of the interactive sequences plus the integration of sound.

For Flash is based on vectorgraphic and uses a special compressing procedure for graphic and sound, it is possible to realize a module with a size of under 200 Kb.

Java: The calculations in our application (random generator, form evaluation) happen in Java for Flash does not provide logical operators. Flash puts out the values which are counted and evaluated by Java.

Installation

In different phases of the production we presented our application to the public and developed a form of presentation which included the given premises. We worked with fans, soil, sand, matches and water and thus created a physical link back to our theme.

Contact

The group members got together while studying media-design at the "L4-Institut für neue Medien", Berlin, Germany. 4Elements is their final project. They founded 1998 the multimedia agency "bottled fish" and closed it 2007.

Members of the 4Elements-project are: Robert Fäth (design), Magnus Hildebrandt (sound), Michael Kuphal (programming), Hartmut Kurz (conception), Michael "lucky" Laqua (documentation and entertainment), Maik Nolte (lead programming)

Contact mail@michaelkuphal.de, Michael Kuphal, Großgörschenstrasse 1, 10827 Berlin, Germany