Michael Saup’s work focuses on the underlying forces of nature and society; an ongoing research project into what he calls the “Archaeology of Future”. His research focus in recent years has been on investigating society’s need and thirst for energy.
by Marko Kosnik 2010
Michael Saup was born in March 1961 in Hechingen, Germany. He is a recognized visual artist, filmmaker and musician. During the 1990s he developed a reputation as one of the foremost protagonists of digital art in Europe. His work, often in cooperation with other established artists, has been shown widely in exhibitions, festivals and on stages around the world. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Michael Saup studied music, computer science and visual communication at the Dominican University of California, San Rafael, USA, the University of Computer Science in Furtwangen and the Offenbach Academy of Art and Design in Germany.
In 1980, while enrolled at the Dominican University, Michael Saup studied music and computer science and started to combine both fields with an algorithmic approach. In 1987, he created “Flicker”, his first computer-generated light installation, which immersed a gallery space with permutations of pulsing light to show an expanding reality. From 1989 onwards, Saup began to experiment with real time transformations of sound and image, helping pioneer the development of software as an artform.
Michael Saup’s early work pioneered direct control of digital film through music and sound-driven interactive computer animations, ground breaking work which he applied to installations, concerts and ballet. With these innovations he created installations like “Pulse8” (1992), concerts like “Hyena Days” (1992) (with Steina Vasulka) and “Binary Ballistic Ballet” (1995) (with William Forsythe and the Frankfurt Ballet).
In 1992 he founded the group ”supreme particles”, helping launch the field of audiovisual processing and interactive environments. This group specialised in the creation of experimental innovative software in connection with art, architecture and music. A well-known work of this group was “Light as Skin” (1997), a connecting passenger transit tunnel bathed in light at Frankfurt International Airport being one of the first large scale interactive works of media art in a public space.
Their installation “R111” (1999-2001) exhibited the concept of virtual matter and its ramifications in the real world. While new media actual tendencies were virtualizing reality, R111 took the inverse approach of materializing virtuality: choreographing particles of matter as though they were pixels.
The turn of the century saw Michael Saup begin to focus on political and social issues, such as access to communications media, consumption and transformation of fossil and “infossil” resources, nuclear history, financial theory and its application to mankind’s day to day existence. As part of a financial index modeling experiment, he developed a model which has predicted with a high degree of accuracy the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the past 113 years, including the fall of 2008 and with a fixed extrapolation until the year 2038.
As part of his 'Weapons of Mass Education' project, he initiated workshops with young promising filmmakers in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Morocco, Afghanistan and Europe.
Michael Saup is currently writing the treatment for the movie “1001 SUNS” and a proposal for the building and operation of a multichannel cinematic studio, a format recorded with multiple cameras. Although still in production, parts of “1001 SUNS” have already been performed with live music in Switzerland, Germany and Turkey.
Research and Teaching
Michael Saup has held appointments at several leading universities, including the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, the University of Arts Bremen and the Zürich University of the Arts. From 1991 to 1994 he was artistic and scientific assistant at the famous Institute for New Media in Frankfurt (with Peter Weibel). In 1999 he was appointed as founding professor for Digital Art at ZKM Academy of Art and Design, the foremost institution within its field in Europe, where he remained in residence through 2005.
Press
“Sometimes, it felt
like the inner workings of the universe made visible. It revolved
slowly, then grew in complexity until it seemed, in substance if not
style, like a collaboration between da Vinci, Picasso and Stephen
Hawking.”
Evening Post, Auckland,
New Zealand
“A performance like
a LSD-trip!”
Uitkrant, Amsterdam,
Netherlands
“...a merciless revealer using the means of Art.”
