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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF KURT CAVIEZEL
Publisher: Rorhof, Bolzano, Italy
Foreword: Joachim Schmid
Language: e/i/d
Format: 414 pages, hardcover, 16×24 cm
Date: May 2015
ISBN: 978-88-909817-5-3
For the past 15 years, from his studio in Zurich, Kurt Caviezel has been monitoring 15,000 publicly accessible webcams located all over the world. By taking screenshots of any situation he found interesting he compiled an archive of more than 3 million images, categorizing them for recurring patterns and subjects.
The dust jacket of the book contains all 15,000 web-links used by Kurt Caviezel to create this body of work.
From the foreword by Joachim Schmid: Through years of camera surveillance the artist has compiled a virtually unreal amount of images, which have all been harvested from webcams. The quantity of images is of crucial importance here, because quantity (as is the case with many collections of things) at some point turns into quality. Only abundance enables the detection of recurring patterns. May the single image be just funny or banal or vacuous, in a series of similar ones it becomes a building block of knowledge. By sequencing kindred images, Caviezel makes order emerge from the torrent of images.
While Google Street View has gotten all the fanfare as the preferred public video source for artistic mining, the lowly net-connected webcam (multiplied by likely tens of thousands) shuffles on in the overlooked background, continuously staring out at airports and weather stations, ski hills and traffic intersections, endlessly spooling up minute-by-minute footage of the mundane. While at first glance, such imagery wouldn’t appear to be a likely candidate for serendipity (most of these cameras are looking out at fixed locations, doing everyday jobs), the fact is the world is surprisingly full of accidents, coincidences, and wonders, and these cameras are inadvertently there to record them. So in an unlikely variant on the tortoise and hare story, webcam archives are turning out to be a more powerful resource than we might ever have imagined.
For the past 15 years, Kurt Caviezel has been monitoring some 15000 individual webcams all over the world, intermittently taking screenshots of his finds. (As an aside, in a meaningful feat of typographical miniaturization, every webcam address he’s been monitoring has been listed on the cover of this book in astonishingly small type.) His image archive...read more
A variant of this argument is provided by The Encyclopedia of Kurt Caviezel. Caviezel compiled "an archive of more than 3 million images, categorizing them for recurring patterns and subjects." What it does is straightforward: there is a large list of entries, starting with "airport" and continuing through obvious and not obvious ones, to finally arrive at "zoo."
The book makes a more complex use of how photography determines meaning than one might realize at first, given that webcams are usually used for evidentiary, not encyclopedic purposes. There is much to be said for a better, more profound engagement with those forms of photography that aren't fully accepted into the canon... read more
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RED LIGHT
Publisher: Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich
Format: Softcover, 276 pages, 252 b/w images, 21×24 cm
Date: 2000
ISBN: 978-3-905509-21-2
During the summer months of 1997 - 99, Kurt Caviezel photographs, through his window, the interiors of cars stopping at the red light outside his apartment on a busy Zurich intersection.
The view through the 1000 mm tele lens, double-glazed window pane and curved car screen is obstructed by reflected light, mirrorings and slight distortions, acquiring a certain atmospheric distance in its surreptitious encroachment while seeming detached, objective, interested only in passing.
The slanted view from above catches a spectacularly commonplace interface between intimacy and public view.
Red Light is fragments of sitting bodies and snatches of expressive body language, a complex, fascinating ballet of gestures and hinted-at movements between steering-wheel and safety-belt, as well as a fleetingly captured inventory of details of car interiors and pieces of clothing, with a wealth of expressive signs and patterns.
Red Light is a stream of information on which the viewer glides along, pouring over the detail of a purse embossed with a heart pattern here, and musing on the assimilation of individualism and anonymity there.
There's plenty of action, in Kurt Caviezel's Red Light (Zürich, Berlin, NewYork, Scalo, 2000, $45).
In the tradition (sort of) of Walker Evans and, more recently, Luc Delahaye, this is the Swiss contribution to photographs of anonymous passengers.
Rather than smuggling his camera onto the subway, Caviezel stayed in his apartment and, using a 100mm telephoto lens, photographed the occupants of cars stopped at a red light. These are grainy, partial glimpses, yet Caviezel manages to catch a sometimes comic accumulation of fleeting gestures within these seemingly private cocoons.
He has grouped the images loosely, but thematically: drivers talking on the phone, appeasing children, eating; animals (from living passengers to faux zebra seat covers); people arguing, preening in rear-view mirrors, and (of course) picking their noses. Drivers and passengers hold hands, kiss, smoke, gesticulate, read (!).
But within this remarkable variety, it's actually the repetition of gesture that stands out: the number of people who scratch with intense concentration at their arms, for instance, or yawn with abandon while waiting for the light to change are part of his rough typology of behind-the-wheel behavior.
And we, sheepishly, recognize ourselves in these pictures of anonymous strangers.
POINTS OF VIEW
Editor: Ulrich Binder & Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur
Texts: Beat Stutzer & Ulrich Binder
Design: Ulrich Binder
Publisher: Edition Howeg, Zürich 2002