Christa Sommerer, * 1964 in Gmunden (AT) and Laurent Mignonneau, * 1967 in Angoulême (FR), live and work in Linz (AT).

The Value of Art (Unruhige See), 2010

In the field of media art production and research, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau are well-known for their innovative interactive works of art, which establish “connections between artificial life and genetic art.” Initial international recognition came with the installation Interactive Plant Growing (1992), a milestone of the newly emerging media art, now part of the ZKM permanent collection. The installation places the audience within a dark environment, where digital plants grow in response to how much the visitor caresses their physical counterparts. .

The Value of Art (Unruhige See) marks the beginning of a new project that investigates the relationship between the exhibition and the market value of a work of art. For the realization of the work the artists purchased a painting at an auction house in Vienna for 450 Euro and subsequently transformed it into an interactive installation. Sensors installed within the painting measure the amount of time a viewer stands in front of it and, through this, estimate the amount of attention and appreciation the artwork receives. At the same time, an integrated printer produces a bill indicating the painting’s current price based on purchase and production costs and the continually increasing exhibition value. The artists see the new series as “anthropophagic works where we buy art work at auction houses as ready-mades, cannibalize them and equip them with our sensor technology and price calculation unit, [so as] to transparently re-calculate their monetary values based on the artists’ and audiences’ time and attention.“ (SG))

The Value of Art (Unruhige See), 2010