Wolfgang Spahn

Born in 1970 in Ingolstadt (Germany)
Lives and works in Berlin (Germany)

Wolfgang Spahn is an Austrian-German visual artist based in Berlin. He teaches at the Professional Association of Visual Artists in Berlin (BBK-Berlin) and is Associated Lecturer at the University of Paderborn, Department of Media Studies as well as at the University of Oldenburg, Department of Art and Visual Culture. Spahn has presented his work at numerous exhibitions, biennials and festivals of media art throughout the world.

Of his work for KB17, Spahn writes: “The media installation Noctilucent aims at re-mediating Pakistani truck art. A burnt out mini-bus located on the premises of the biennale in Karachi serves as both an artefact and a canvas. By using mulitcoloured LED's to up-cycle the bus, Noctilucent creates patterns that are luminous only at night or at twilight. In the same way as noctilucent clouds are visible only when the sun is already below the horizon and is illuminating them from below, Noctilucent is representing mediatized patterns at night while the actual paintings are hardly visible. During the day Noctilucent showcases black and white patterns of frost flowers to match the ice-crystals noctilucent clouds are made of. From dust to dawn, multicoloured LED's move to-and-fro the spectrum of colours, motioned by the algorithm the installation is based on. The surface of the bus functions as a palimpsest – a valuable 'parchment' that had been written upon twice, with the first writing washed away to make space for new writing, in this case for the re-use of media. Yet the LED‘s changes are influenced by cosmic rays: Whenever a cosmic trigger hits the installation, the contemplative movement gets disrupted, the LED‘s flare and flicker before it finally tranquilizes. Thus Noctilucent uses re-mediation as a translucent process that does not want to efface the old medium nor does it want to efface itself entirely. By using strong contrasts for day-or-night- display, Noctilucent emphasizes the difference between the old medium and the new one rather than erases it.” Spahn’s performative piece, Entropie, is also part of the Karachi Biennale 2017.