977, Düsseldorf, Germany
Berlin-based artist Ralf Baecker has worked at the intersection of art, technology and science for more than ten years.
Through installations and machines, Baecker explores fundamental mechanisms of action and the effects of new media and technologies. In his representations and spatializations of microscopic processes he seeks to completely disrupt our perception. At the core of his objects lies the entanglement of the virtual with the actual, or rather, with the world. With a media-archaeological outlook, Ralf Baecker digs within obsolete devices for traces and functions that are still detectable in technologies today. His work seeks to form a hybrid between current digital aesthetics and an historical understanding of materials. As a result, he understands technology not as a tool but rather as an epistemological instrument, in order to pose elemental questions about a world perceived through technological impressions.
Baecker has been awarded multiple prizes and grants for his artistic work, including an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2012 and 2014, and second prize at the VIDA 14.0 Art & Artificial Life Award in Madrid for “Irrational Computing,” a sound and light installation that relates to the disappearance, or rather invisibility, of materiality in contemporary information technology. The artist developed the project during a three-month-long residency at DOCK e.V. in Berlin with support from the Schering Stiftung.
His work has been presented in international festivals and exhibitions, such as the International Triennial of New Media Art 2014 in Beijing, Künstlerhaus Wien, ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijon, and Malmö Konsthall.
Born in 1977 in Düsseldorf, Ralf Baecker studied Computer Science and Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, and has taught at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and the University of the Arts in Bremen. Baecker is currently a fellow at the Graduate School at the University of the Arts Berlin.
