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.
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. 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.
Life
Bielicky was appointed professor of the Ateliér nových médií (New Media Department) at the Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze (AVU, Visual Arts University, Prague) in 1991, until 2006. Concurrently, he collaborated with the Goethe Institute Prague and organized several symposia since 1991 about Vilém Flusser. Since 1991 he heads established various Media Art departments throughout Eastern Europe as a Soros Center for the Arts (SCCA) representative.
From 1995 to 1996 he was a scientific consultant for culture and technology for the Council of Europe in Strasbourg and subsequently in 1996 assigned co-founder of Unstable Thoughts in Kyiv, Ukraine. In 1997, Bielicky cooperated with the High Tech Center Babelsberg in Potsdam and, in the mid-1990s, he began developing interactive installations and performances. From 1999 to 2001, he developed the Virtual Set Project at ZKM, and since 2002, he has been involved in establishing the first New Media Department at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand.
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), the Columbus-2.0- (2008-2011), Data Dybukk-group (2015-2018), and the newest work Narcissistic Machine (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 Mobile 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 Seasons (1984), Circulus Vicious (1985), and Paik-Hat (1986) are disturbing linear narrative traditions through cutting techniques and stop motion alone, whereas Perpetuum Mobile (1986), Next Year in Jerusalem (1988) and Golem is Alive (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/Inventur (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. 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.
