Erwin Redl Paper

Gina Herrera

Digital Imaging

Professor Spradlin

Erwin Redl

Erwin Redl was born in 1963 in Gfohl, Lower Austria, although he currently works in New York since the year 1993. He received a diploma in electronic music in Vienna at the Music Academy, as well as a BA in Composition. He has received mny awards in the CD-rom categories, as well as architecture / environmental studies. Redl als holds residencies in various places, including Texas, the PS1 studio in Queens, NY, and others in the Czech Republic. He has had about 20 solo shows total in various states and countries, as well as many group shows. As of 2006 he has shown even more works than usual per year. The Museum of the Lower State of Austria and the Whitney feature him in their permanent college, plus many lesser well-known places.

Redl is best known for his creations involving huge scaled curtains of LED lights. He creates virtual realities that take the viewer on an experience that makes them think outside the box. He changes one’s perception on the “out of body experience completely. Redl focuses on forcing the viewer to occupy certain spaces within his objects, and the amount of time, work and effort that goes into just one piece is phenomenal. Redl is also fairly well known for computer design.

One of his more interesting computer-based interactions is called “truth is a moving target”. You can find it here -- http://www.paramedia.net/projects/truth/truth.html. Basically the viewer clicks on the screen, which is gray and black striped in the background, while the center box is dark and light red striped. When the viewer clicks, words pop up all over the screen in the places you click. Some phrases include “modernism was about death itself” and all types of other abstract sentences that can be construed in many different ways. Also, if you click in the same spot again, the words will disappear, and if you click yet again, different words and phrases pop up. All in all it’s very interesting, I had a lot of fun playing with it, to be honest, because the phrases he uses really caught my eye and I spent a pretty long while trying to rearrange the words and pull up different sentences.

Another piece by Redl that is well worth mentioning is his work “Matrix” series I and II. These two pieces are very interesting – green LED’s [light-emitting diodes] are strung up around the room in different patterns of gridwork and curtain-esque shapes that surround the viewers. This virtual reality is intended to invoke feelings of the bending of time and space. He wanted viewers to focus on the abstraction of it all, and even went so far as to esplain to a reporter that these two pieces made him question the meaning of life itself. The main focus is the inhabitation of space, where the viewer can stand in the center and wonder about their own point of existence. This type of piece is known as “reverse engineering”.

In conclusion, Redl has clearly pioneered many areas and aspects of the term virtual reality. His pieces make the viewer think about time and space, something that is often ignored in life. Every piece of his invokes deep and profound ideas, and he continues to do so even now while he lives and works in the United States.

Final Artist Book

Artist Comparison

Cindy Sherman/Frida Kahlo


Although they used different mediums in their work, Frieda Kahlo and Cindy Sherman are both extremely profound figures in the history of self-portraiture in very different ways.

Firstly, Frieda Kaho’s pieces are more oriented on pain and suffering – her work is clearly extremely personal, between her train accident, her miscarriages, her failed marriage, and many surgeries. Her work conveys her life’s most influencing times on a deeply personal level, especially since it was one of the few activities she could do after her accident for the next three months. Over a third of her total paintings are self-portraits, which shows how greatly these events affected her life.

Kahlo also incorporated many aspects of her Mexican culture into her self-portraits, indicating that she was proud of her heritage and didn’t want to lose her roots. Also incorporated are ideas and values held by Christians and Jews, so religion clearly was another influence in her life as well. Kahlo’s surrealist approach on real events in her life was revolutionary, and she appears to have interpreted many of these significant events through usage of symbolism and representation in her works as well.

Cindy Sherman, on the other hand, although also doing numerous self-portraits, did not always intend for herself to be the subject. It appears that she wanted to draw more attention to world issues – such as racism, feminism, etc. Much of her work was created to sort of mock the policies of American advertising and cinema. Despite the fact that they were self-portraits physically, in theory she never intended to be “Cindy Sherman” in the piece in theory. The point was that it could have been anyone in the pictures, and demonstrated the usage of sex appeal in many of them as well.