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BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH:
ANDREA ZAPP
Between Heaven and Earth blurs the boundaries between media, Internet, traditional artistic styles and craft. The artworks refer to the permanently growing shift of our existences, and the ways we reside between two worlds, physical and digital, off- and online.
They display a virtual trip based on satellite imagery downloaded from Google Earth. Following the given path of the so called virtual sightseeing route, major global sites like the Red Square in Moscow, The London Eye, The Forbidden City in Beijing or the Centre Pompidou Centre in Paris were visited. The snapshots taken during this online flight were printed onto fabric, and stretched onto frames. They become large-scale artefacts reminiscent of paintings, through which the satellite picture is turned into a corporeal and decorative object. Resolution, colour codes, display formats, viewing angles and other specifics of online surveillance imagery change into surreal patterns, abstract sceneries, dreamlike panoramas. The textile forms the central narrative, displaying the digital space as the new fabric of society and rendering it domestic. However, the supposedly underlying concept of authenticity and truth in satellite imagery now appears fictional and illusory with time and space becoming ephemeral and imaginary.
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Andrea Zapp, born in Germany, creates digital “Networked Installation Stages”, art installations that are mixing and referencing real, virtual and online spaces. Recent research also includes “Media, Miniature and Shifting Scales” as another reflective format of installation architecture and digital habitat.
Current ongoing experiments take these ideas further into “Textile Media”, combining narrative and digital imagery with fabric print and design, embroidery and sculpture. She has edited two books, Networked Narrative Environments as imaginary spaces of being, MMU/FACT Liverpool, 2004; and New Screen Media, Cinema/Art/Narrative, BFI, London, 2002, (with Martin Rieser). She curated international Media Art exhibitions - StoryRooms, Networked Media Art & Installations, at The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, Oct 05 to Jan 06 and The World is My Imagination, Media-Model-Miniature, at CUBE Gallery Manchester, Sept to Nov 2007; and POI – Moving, Mapping, Memory, at Cornerhouse Manchester, June 2009. She has lectured and shown her artworks at numerous international venues, exhibitions and festivals since the Mid Nineties. She is a Senior Lecturer for Media Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University, School of Art and Media; and a Programme Leader of the MA Media Lab (Postgraduate Creative Media Practice in Film, Photography and Media Arts).
Visit www.azapp.de for more information.