Franz John

Germany
Visual
Artist in Residence, 1996
http://www.f-john.de

Artist Statement

Franz John works with human and mechanical interfaces, using both new and old media to identify the barely noticeable and visualize it, making the unobservable visible through large scale installations. For instance Military Eyes, in which he transformed disused military bunkers surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge into huge walk-in Camera Obscuras. Salt Axis, stretches 55 miles overland, creating awareness of the subterranean salt deposits laid down by a dried-out primordial ocean in Muensterland, Germany. Another project, Turing Tables, shown at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA on the centennial of the 1906 Great Earthquake, examines online and live “the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux.”