“A robotic voice sounds from the receiver of a classical telephone. A letter is recited, written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as his alter ego Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon in 1902.
A video installation composed of three screens shows early twentieth century recordings - short sequences of a coach journey, a river, and a landscape reminiscent of England. Hofmannsthal retreated to the British province to understand the language of nature and escape the confusion of his occupation with language and literature. A few seconds later, the black and white image starts to flicker, colorful codes run across the screen. Just like when fast-forwarding a videcossette, and the needed data is not rendered in time, the clips show contortions, flickers and pixels in foreign colors.
In her work FEHLERFAKTOR the young artist Nieves de la Fuente Gutiérrez generates glitches in the rendering processes of analog and digital data.
A hex-editor-Software allows her to view the collected data and to access their inner structure. similar to biology, de la fuente Gutiérrez understands the digital image as a system with a phenotype and genotype. She decoded the genotype of the three video clips of fehlerFaktor and inserted the code into a text. This second text is also a letter with the title “an lord Chandos, ein Fax aus der Zukunft (To Lord Chandos, a fax from the future)” written by Durs GRünbein in 2002. In this letter to hofmannsthal’s alter ego he addresses the natural changes of language in the course of time.
The errors in FEHLERFAKTOR originate from a misinterpretation of data are determined by the system and can be compared to a mistake that occurs in a translation of literature or a misinterpretation of a daily situation due to unfamiliar parameters.
The artist creates errors and glitches that provoke and challenge the viewer’s perception. The work addresses the dificulties and sheer endless possibilities of interpretation of the complex digital system
(...)” Julian Schneider