pneumatic sculptures - Franz Bahr

When Mc Luhan published his work “The Medium is the Message” in 1964, not only was he way ahead of his time, but he also reflected the influence the media have on humanity and culture in a way nobody else had. This was the time when the mechanistic age was replaced by the electric age.

In the mechanistic age it was machines which dominated and defined the course of the day, and it was the age of linearity: one thing followed another.

In the social and cultural context this means: It was the age of principles, dogmas and objectivity.
Architecture was dominated by monumental buildings with small windows. In art it was images of the human locomotor system and the geometries found in nature. A particular phenomenon of the electric age is simultaneity: Due to the electronic transfer of data, space and time shrink and everything is available everywhere at the same time. Radical political and cultural movements were the typical side effects of this transition. The typical hierarchical structures which prevailed in the mechanistic age were called into question.

Whilst in the mechanistic age monumental sculptures predominated, with a major focus on the material, and always standing on a plinth, in the electric age the first media installations appeared: they were fleeting, and disappeared again as quickly as they had appeared.

Add to this the phenomenon of the age of light: the absence of touch.Information is transferred via optical fibres, operations are performed by laser, light is converted into energy. The “pneumatic sculptures” precisely reflect the events of the times: Sketches are created in linear fashion and then electronically converted into drawing files.

Using this electronic information, a machine using light (laser) cuts the shapes out of the metal sheets, which will later become the shells. Electric fire now takes the place of mechanical fire for welding. Air replaces the chisel as a medium for creating shape, and does so everywhere and at the same time.

These sculptures no longer need any mass, ultimately there is only a thin shell between the internal and the external, - and they only have contact with the earth intermittently. Where the human locomotor system still dominated in the mechanistic view of the world, now significantly it is the brain and its network structure which represent the electric age.

So it should no longer surprise us that the pneumatic sculptures find both their creative origin and also their goal in the unconscious portion of the human intellectual faculty.