Michael Bielicky (born 12 January 1954 in Prague) is a Czech-German artist working in new media, video art, and installations. He is a professor in the department of digital media and post-digital narratives at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. In 1989, Bielicky's artwork Menora/Inventur became his first work to be acquired by the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe by its founder Heinrich Klotz.Heinrich Klotz, Ursula Anna Frohne (Eds). Kunst der Gegenwart (Exhibition on the occasion of the 1997 Grand Opening of the ZKM, Centre for Media and Arts in Karlsruhe). Munich, New York, Prestel. 1997. pp. 54–55. .
Early life Michael Bielicky spent his childhood in Czechoslovakia and emigrated with his parents to Düsseldorf, Germany in 1969. He studied medicine from 1975 to 1978. He lived in New York from 1980 to 1981 and experimented with photography there. Michael Bielicky returned to Germany in 1981 and worked for Monochrome Magazine from 1981 to 1989.Michael Schürmann (Ed.). Monochrome. CT-Verlag, Krefeld, Germany. Desk: Ika Groeger, MiSCH, Jost Ertl, Bettina Bartsch, Michael Melter. Imprint is taken from issue 4, November/December 1984. p. 3. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1984 to 1989, initially with Bernd Becher, and soon changed disciplines to study with Nam June Paik. He graduated in 1989 and worked as Paik's assistant until 1991.Susanne Rennert, Stephan von Wiese (Hrsg.). Students of Paik: 1978 – 95, video dreams. Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum im Ehrenhof. 1996. S. 22ff und S. 132.
Life Bielicky was appointed professor of the (New Media Department) at the (AVU, Visual Arts University, Prague) in 1991, and served in that position until 2006. While at AVU, he collaborated with the Goethe Institute Prague and organized several symposia about Vilém Flusser.Prague Media Symposium - Monoskop. Website der Seite Monoskop. Retrieved 23 June 2017.Michael Bielicky - Vilém Flussers Fluß. Website des ZKM Karlsruhe. Retrieved 23 June 2017. Since 1991, he also heads established various Media Art departments throughout Eastern Europe as a Soros Center for the Arts (SCCA) representative.Institut za Suvremenu Umjetnost (SCCA) - People Website. Website des SCCA. Retrieved 20 June 2014.
From 1995 to 1996, he was a scientific consultant for culture and technology for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and subsequently in 1996, was assigned co-founder of Unstable Thoughts in Kyiv, Ukraine.Institution of Unstable Thoughts - Monoskop. Monoskop-Website. Retrieved 23 June 2017. In 1997, Bielicky cooperated with the High Tech Center Babelsberg in Potsdam.
Since the mid-1990s, he has been developing interactive installations and performances. From 1999 to 2001, he developed the Virtual Set Project at ZKM,Hannes Leopoldseder, Christine Schöpf (Eds.). Cyberarts 2000: International Compendium Prix Ars Electronica. Springer. 2000. Pp. 88-89. and since 2002, he has been involved in establishing the first New Media Department at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand.ICECA - Cultural Exchange and Computer Arts - activities. culturebase.org-Website. Retrieved 23 June 2017.
Since 2006, Bielicky has been a professor of Digital Media at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe and has collaborated with Kamila B. Richter. They have worked on four technically linked groups of works: the Falling group (2005–2010),SIGGRAPH 2011 art papers, and Tracing Home Art Gallery. Leonardo 44,4 Special issue. Cambridge, MIT Press. 2011. S. 356 ff. the Columbus 2.0 (2008–2011),Rubén Barroso (Ed.). Youniverse Sevilla, Granada: Bienal de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla (biacs3). Fundación Biacs. 2008. Pp. 78-79. Data Dybukk group (2015–2018),Dimitri Konstantinidis. e.city Prague 2016. Strasbourg, Apollonia. pp. 38-51. . and the newest work Narcissistic Machine (2018),Michael Bielicky & Kamila B. Richter - Narcissistic Machine. ZKM website. Viewed on 1 June 2018. which is the initial work of a new group of works and marks a new technical and aesthetic programming onset.
Works: In Between Video and Media Installations
Produced in 1986, Perpetuum MobileMedienOperative (Hrsg.), Micky Kwella, Jörg Himstedt (Rd.). VideoFilmFest ’88 des 18. Internationalen Forums des jungen Films. Berlin, Internationales Forum des jungen Films. 1988. S. 19. was one of Michael Bielicky's first video works produced in Düsseldorf. Bielicky tried to reinvent his artistic practice along major technical cornerstones, starting with Stop Motion, via U-Matic, Time base correction with DOC (Drop-out compensator) to GPS, the Internet, and real-time data and provoked and documented the aesthetic errors of the specter in the machine, in parallel and in contradiction to the ongoing technical refinement process of the media industry.
In the 1980s he developed unintended techniques with the first digital video editing machines to alter, distort and rearrange his video material, akin to his mentor Nam June Paik's debut exhibition in 1963, where Paik used magnets to distort his own television-set-based exhibits. Works like Four SeasonsMichael Bielicky – Four Seasons. LIMA website. Retrieved 27. Juni 2017. (1984), Circulus Vicious (1985), and Paik-Hat (1986) are disturbing linear narrative traditions through cutting techniques and stop motion alone, whereas Perpetuum MobileMichael Bielicky – Perpetuum Mobile. LIMA website. Retrieved 27. Juni 2017. (1986), Next Year in JerusalemPetra Unnützer (Hg.). 3. Videonale : 11. - 16.9.1988. Bonn, Videonale. 1988. S. 53.Michael Bielicky - Next Year in Jerusalem. LIMA website. Retrieved 27. Juni 2017. (1988) and Golem is AliveDario Ghanai. Videonale 5. Bonn, Videonale. 1992. S.110.Michael Bielicky - Golem Is Alive. LIMA website. Retrieved 27. Juni 2017. (1989) introduce digital editing techniques to create videos, that appear to be haunted by the specters of early East European media culture. In 1989, the same year Golem is Alive is released, Michael Bielicky expands the two-dimensional screen into the exhibition space. With his Menorah/InventurKarl Gerbel, Peter Weibel (Hrsg.). Die Welt von innen, Endo & Nano (Ars Electronica 92). Linz, Veritas-Verlag. 1992. S. 126 ff. (1989) he does away with the screen frames with the intent to dissolve those in a symbolically powerful sculpture, one of the main symbols of the Jewish religion.Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich. Holocaust memory reframed: museums and the challenges of representation. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press. 2014. pp. 178-180. . One year later, in 1990, he does away with the religious symbolism and houses his videos in the most universal scientific and technical symbol, the spiral:
"One can walk through the spiral-like tunnel. At the end of that tunnel is a black sphere (somewhere). A small TV transmitter transmits the information (in the form of a flame) to the carrier, the spiral, and the receivers (TVs). Information always moves through time and space in the same form. It always has the form of a spiral. The sounds of human language move through space in the same way as our solar system moves through the universe. We store information on a computer disc in a spiral form, as we do on a videotape.Ginette Major (Ed.). Images du futur '91: 31 mai - 22 septembre, cité des arts et des Nouvelles technologies de Montréal. 1991. p. 18.
The Name (1990),Axel Klepsch (Hg), Vilém Flusser, Nam June Paik (Autors). Discover European Video: Anthology Film Archives, New York 17–25 November 1990. Düsseldorf, 1990. S. 11, 46.Wendelin Renn (Hg.). "Schirm-Herrschaft" Video Kunst: 27. Juni bis 25. Juli 1993, Städtische Galerie Lovis-Kabinett Villingen-Schwenningen. Villingen-Schwenningen [u.a.], Städtische Galerie [u.a.]. 1993. S. 16. which is technically akin to Menorah/Inventur (the small televisions are receivers for a video source nearby, fire and screens are intertwined as a symbol of and a means of communication), is the attempt to balance technical expertise and historic cultural mystery in one work of art. Bielicky tries to unmask technology as one Metanarrative among many.
In 1987 Bielicky examined the destruction of Joseph Beuys's Fettecke (Fat Corner) in collaboration with Ricardo Peredo Wende. The resulting documentary video sculpture is a who is who of Beuys's students and disciples, as well as a cascade of partly absurd, partly fascinating explanations, of why and how this case of a janitor's utter ignorance of art has implications for the future of art as a whole.Freunde der Deutschen Kinemathek e.V. (Ulrich Gregor, Peter B. Schumann) (Hrsg.). 17. Internationales Forum des jungen Films. Berlin, Felgentreff & Goebel. 1987. S. 58.Christoph Blase (Hg.). 40jahrevideokunst.de - Teil 2. Ostfildern, Hatje Cantz. 2010. S. 86 ff, 411 ff.
Bielicky aimed to inscribe the biblical Exodus route into the early framework of what would become the internet. Described as a teleperformance, Bielicky and collaborators equipped a Jeep with advanced technology of the period and tracked the Exodus route in the Negev desert, collecting GPS data and uploading it to one of the first websites. This project, situated at the intersection of religion and narrative technology, represents a pivotal moment in Bielicky's oeuvre. Technology is no longer shrouded in mystique; the balance established in The Name (1990) shifts toward technological agency, as Bielicky systematically traces the biblical history of Jewish culture through scientific means.Karl Gerbel, Peter Weibel. (Ed.): Exhibition Catalogue: Ars Electronica 95: Mythos Information. Welcome to the Wired World. Springer, Vienna. 1995. pp. 214 ff.
In 1994 he begins to experiment with GPS in an art context: his work Intelligent Mailman (1994) is the first of its kind worldwide and marks the onset of numerous foundational research projects on interactive media art (see: Works: Proceedings and Foundations).
Since 2005 - in cooperation with Kamila B. Richter - Bielicky develops web-based, often interactive projects, controlled by real-time data fed from the Internet. Market and stock exchange data, news, Twitter, and other data streams guide their animated stories - often in an uncanny and counterintuitive way. This workshop series can be described by four major setups: The earliest two web-based projects with Kamila B. Richter are Columbus 2.0 and Falling Life/Times (with a predecessor called Falling Stars). Columbus 2.0 was displayed in Wuhan (2007), SevillaDavina Jackson. SuperLux, Smart Light Art, Design & Architecture for Cities. Thames & Hudson. 2015. pp. 92 ff. (2008), and Thessaloniki (2011), whereas Falling Life/Times was displayed in Barcelona (2007), São Paulo (2008), and New York (2008).Danilo Santos de Miranda. (Ed.): Exhibition Catalogue: SESC: Mostra Sec De Artes 08. Conselho Regional do SESC São Paulo, São Paulo. 2008. pp. 99 ff. see his entry on the AGI web site