Wolfgang Staehle

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Wolfgang Staehle is an early pioneer of net.art in the United States, known for his video streaming of the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City during the September 11 attacks. He also captured the crash of the first plane into the World Trade Center.

Contents

Education

Wolfgang Staehle was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1950, and studied at the Freie Kunstschule Stuttgart. In 1976, he moved to New York and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts.

Life and work

After getting his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he worked as a video artist, and in 1991, he founded The Thing. [1] The Thing was an Internet forum for new media art. It started out as an independent media project that began as a bulletin board system (BBS) that later became an online forum for artists and cultural theorists to exchange ideas. By the late 1990s, The Thing grew into a successful online community and began hosting artists' websites. It also includes a mailing list and was the first Website devoted to net.art, bbs.thing.net. [2]

In 1996, he started his series of live online video streams. His first series is called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing's office located in New York's West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. This project was a reference to Andy Warhol's 1964 film Empire which was a silent, eight-hour-long black-and-white film in which the camera focused on the Empire State Building from dusk until dawn. [3]

Staehle has continued working on his series of live online video streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest. Staehle currently serves as the Executive Director of The Thing and is represented by the Postmasters Gallery in New York. [4]

Wolfgang Staehle is also famous for his time lapse footage of the events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. [5] Taken from his office in Brooklyn, Wolfgang Staehle's video is one of only three known videos to capture American Airlines Flight 11 impacting the North Tower of the World Trade Center, along with videos taken by Jules Naudet [6] and Pavel Hlava. [7]

Notable projects

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1993
1996
2000
2001
2004
2008
2009
2012
2014
2015
2016

Group exhibitions

2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018

Germany.

Germany.

2019

Footnotes

  1. Dieter Daniels, Gunther Reisinger (Eds.) "Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art", Sternberg. 2010.
  2. "Staehle's Resume" . Retrieved 2008-04-28.
  3. Dieter Daniels, Gunther Reisinger (Eds.) "Net Pioneers 1.0: Contextualizing Early Net-Based Art", Sternberg. 2010.
  4. Tribe, Mark; Jana,Reena (2007). New Media Art. Germany: Taschen. p. 90. ISBN   978-3-8228-3041-3.
  5. "A view of the Towers: Video that captured 9-11 to screen at Brooklyn Historical Society". 11 September 2018. Retrieved 2019-02-19.
  6. "Bond of Brothers". Vanity Fair . 11 September 2014. Retrieved 2019-02-19.
  7. Glanz, James (7 September 2003). "TWO YEARS LATER: IMAGES; A Rare View Of Sept. 11, Overlooked". The New York Times. Retrieved 2019-02-19.

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