Florian Dombois & Christoph Oeschger: Films of the Wind

Where’s the wind when it’s not blowing? Can it be contained in a film?

Most wind tunnels are there for testing. Almost everything is tested in them: Cars, air-planes, rockets, but also flies, people, or baseballs. After the testing comes optimization. The technologies of mobility devised in the course of the 20th and 21st centuries are products of the wind tunnel. There is also a wind tunnel on the roof of the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). The majority of the photographs in this exhibition originate from this place. The wind tunnel, developed by artists, is a place that makes it possible to keep experiencing the wind in ever different ways. In it, the optimization and control of nature become self-reflexive. Scientific flow research has domesticated the wind in tunnels in order to make it laminar and testable, to make it measurable, and even to record it photographically or filmically. The films of the wind presented in the exhibition, on the other hand, are the result of experimental activities dedicated to the invisible and that which is rendered invisible. They give space to the multisensory poetry of the wind. They show how technical applications subordinate wind to principles of usability. And they reveal the politics of mobility and immobility that go with the filmic reproduction of the flow.

The exhibition includes video installations by Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger. The recordings come from the own artistic wind tunnel of the research focus “Transdisciplnarity” at the ZHdK and reflect questions of time, objectivity as well as the domination of nature. A functional model of the U5 wind tunnel and an essay film made in collaboration with Mario Schulze and Sarine Waltenspül complete the exhibition. In parallel with the exhibition, the DFG College Research Group MECS of Leuphana University will hold a workshop entitled “Windkanäle. Wissen, Politik und Ästhetik bewegter Luft” (“Wind Tunnels. Knowledge, Politics and Aesthetics of Moving Air”), which brings together research results from media studies, the history of knowledge, and artistic research on wind tunnels.

Florian Dombois (*1966, Berlin) is an artist dealing with time, wind, land forms, and tectonics. In 2010 he received the Deutscher Klangkunstpreis. http://floriandombois.net

Christoph Oeschger (*1984, Zurich) lives in Zurich as an artist, photographer and publisher. In his work, he explores various forms of the documentary. In 2019 he receives the Hans and Lea Grundig Prize.
http://christophoeschger.ch/ http://cpress.ch
http://floriandombois.net

Parallel scientific workshop (Nov 7-8, 2019) “Windkanäle. Wissen, Politik und Ästhetik bewegter Luft”/”Wind tunnels. Knowledge, politics and aesthetics of moving air”, Concept by Mario Schulze, Sarine Waltenspül and Hannah Zindel https://www.zhdk.ch/meldung/workshop-windkanaele-in-den-wissenschaften-und-den-kuensten-7-8-11-2019-lueneburg-3140

Curator: Mario Schulze

In cooperation with: Media Cultures of Computer Stimulation, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, Swiss National Science Foundation