ALEXANDER HAHN
electronic media artist
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
The Red Sands of Mars
2022
Pigment ink on soft gloss paper, 106,7 × 182,9 cm
Edition 7 + 2 AP
«The Red Sands of Mars» offers a glimpse into an almost surreal interior. On a reddish sandy floor is an Egyptian scribe sculpture. Opposite, there is a model of an experiment with which the British scientist Henry Cavendish proved gravity in 1797. A large hole gapes between them.
The scribe is a photogrammetrically generated 3D model based on photographs I took at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 2019, while the stone reliefs with the symbols are borrowed from the facade of the Swiss National Bank on Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse. The floor, on the other hand, is a procedural texture, that is, created with 3D noise and displacement. The hole is a reference to the 32 boreholes from which the Mars rover Curiosity took rock samples during a NASA mission. The setting here is not my apartment, but my studio on Chrystie Street in Chinatown, where I have been working since 2016.
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
The Partial Devastation of the Lower East Side Through Man-made and Natural Disasters
Date: 2021
Dimension: 43 x 64 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA
A door stays standing amidst the mounds presiding over a few linoleum tiles, a brass door knob and a half-buried sash window, remnants of our Ludlow Street apartment. Lenin still resides on top of a Norfolk Street tenement, unfazed and now with an unobstructed view towards Wall Street.
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Bringing Things to a Standstill
Date: 2010
Dimension: 43 x 64 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA
The stage in this 2010 rendition of «The Artist's Studio as Encryption Lab: Bringing Things to a Standstill», 2010, is my own kitchen.
Here, I deal with the so-called laser cooling method of the physicist William Daniel Phillips, in which atoms are cooled and trapped with laser light. Phillips won the Nobel Prize for his development in 1997.
The optical set-up for laser light to achieve this usually takes the size of a dining table or - a bathtub, as in my virtual reconstruction of this experiment within my own four walls. In search of an unusual perspective on the scene, I finally positions the camera in the brass cylinder of the door peephole. As a result of this point of view, the kitchen and its inventory, for example the blue airship, appear turned upside down
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
The Early Morning Redness in the East
Date: 2010
Dimension: 43 x 64 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA
«The Early Morning Redness in the East» re-images my living room: the Gulf of Naples with the erupting Vesuvius and a hat in the middle ground. The scene is framed by the mural texture of Genoa Cathedral.
The hat is inspired by a photograph of plant hunter Frank N. Meyer (1875-1918). The 1917 image shows his fedora hat in front of a wild callus pear tree. Frank N. Meyer often placed his hat next to exotic plants in photographs to give an idea of their size. Meyer collected resistant plant species in China for the United States Department of Agriculture. He died in the Yangtze River, whether by accident, suicide or murder remains unclear.
My friend Dieter Froese, the video artist who died in 2006, liked to wear such hats. The memory of Dieter and the mystery surrounding the death of the plant hunter flowed into the 2010 computer-generated image.
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Answerable Questions and Questionable Answers from the Fly's Visual System - Sudden Apparition of a Small Black Hole
Date: 2010
Dimension: 43 x 31 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA2
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Answerable Questions and Questionable Answers from the Fly's Visual System
Date: 2003
Dimension:43 x 31 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Private collection
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Answerable Questions and Questionable Answers from the Tree's Visual System - Photosynthesis 01
Date: 2001
Dimension: 33 x 16 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Private collection
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
The Elements
Date: 1999
Dimension: 43 x 31 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Prehistory
Date: 1999
Dimension: 24 x 16 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA3
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Formation of Clouds
Date: Aug 30, 1999
Dimension: 20 x 16 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA3
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Optical Instruments
Date: 1999
Dimension: 24 x 16 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
First Glimpse
Date: 1999
Dimension: 21.5 x 15.5 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition: 7 + 1 EA3
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Still with my Spirit Daughter on 174 Ludlow Street, NYC
Date: 1995/2009
Dimension: 21.6 x 40 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition 7 + 1 EA
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Anna's Cabinet of Astrological Magick on Zelazna and Grzybowska - revisited
Date: 1995/2007
Dimension: 11 x 40 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Private Collection
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Modern Version of the 1887 Michelson Morley Experiment, the Light Slowed down to 30 cm /sec.
Date: 1996
Dimension: 17 x 30 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Edition 7 + 2 EA
The Artist’s Studio as Encryption Lab
Anna's Cabinet of Astrological Magick on Zelazna and Grzybowska #1
Date: 1995
Dimension: 11 x 40 inch
Technique: pigment ink on fine art paper
Photostiftung Kunstmuseum Bern/CH