Like the butcher’s cap and apron, or the miner’s lamp and company coveralls, the artist’s suit is also a uniform, which identifies him as an economic agent. Periodically, he recites a text which is a series of observations about life in Berlin presented as poetry:

• Haben Sie Arbeit? (Do you have work?)
• Nein, ich habe nicht Arbeit. Ich habe keine Arbeit für Sie. (No, I have no work. I have no work for you.)
• Rotten wood and broken glass
• Spilled paint on the road
• Spilled paint on the sidewalk
• Garbage container number 246, click
• Bricks up,
• Bricks down.
• How many stones in the sidewalk?

The performance examines three dualisms of the industrial process: real vs. simulated; processed vs. unprocessed; and work vs. no work. As well, it examines the artistic process: giving value to worthless materials. The artist’s work on the wood pieces clearly affects their value, but the difference in value between real and fake remains unclear.

When all the pieces have been “holed,” they are stacked in a teetering, squarish pile in the shop window, a tongue-in-cheek salute to industrial production. Farce and economics are woven together into a perilous unity.

text: Edwin Janzen

In its initial form, ASCII Fighter, there are three sections to the performance; Poetry Fighter, Ascii Fighter and Video Fighter. In Poetry Fighter, hits to the gloves, headgear and waist mounted sensors trigger sound samples. The samples are part of a sentence about the inability to express anger. In Ascii Fighter, the gloves trigger series of zeroes and ones on one screen, while on the other video screen, we see the results of the zeroes and ones interpreted as ASCII code, the binary computer language that most computers use to generate letters and symbols. There were two rounds to this section: the first was free form, with random letters and symbols appearing according to their ASCII code; in round two, the boxers hit each other in a predetermined sequence of punches that were designed to spell out a text: “I am an animal”. In Video Fighter, hits trigger various combinations of video loops of the performers apologizing in different ways.

Two years later, the performance was remounted with technical and thematic changes. In ASCII Fighter the fighters were connected to the computers by actual wires. In BOX the sensors were attached to modified wireless video game controllers, which controlled videos stored on a computer running MAX/MSP/JITTER software.

BOX had three sections: the first was Progress/Regress, in which each boxer’s hits generated movement along a hand-painted progress bar, similar to those used to measure internet downloads; in the second round, the boxers hits triggered video clips of the boxers doing pushups to exhaustion; in the third round, they triggered clips of the boxers verbalizing the inner dialogue they might be having while fighting.

The artist started boxing to train for this performance, just to be able to throw a convincing punch, but quickly learned that he had misinterpreted boxing: that it is simply violent and about expressing anger. Rather, he found that staying calm and controlling your fear is the goal. These insights enriched the initial metaphor. ASCII Fighter (BOX) renders the psychological frustrations of communication problems visible as physical violence, and is about pushing oneself through difficult moments.