Nils Benedikt Fischer is a visual artist working with image producing systems, pictorial objects and time based installations.
Reflecting about the individuum isolated in technologized societies, I create narratives that portray public spaces as individual dreams and everyday items as human remains. Therefore I develop and produce projection machines that allow me to arrange multiple projections in order to unfold spaces of physical and virtual interaction. In this environment I contrast realistic footage with the fictitious taxonomies given by the design of the machine and create an overwhelming simultaneity that surrounds the viewer.
Terminal
HD Video / 24:00 / 2021
02:13 min excerpt
Like a tower that grows downwards, Terminal sections the Berlin soil and reveals its public underground transport system. Based on footage recorded in 2019 a fourfold projection shows the stations, tunnels and subterranean life going on and stages an underworld journey in twelve chapters. The centered projection machine incorporates the mirrored architectures of the subway system forming a telluric model, that combines all the technical and human agents into an inseparable process of movement. On top of the tower-like projection machine a rotating disc system is placed that contains a herbarium of common street plants. With each new chapter this overground garden readjusts itself and generates enigmatic interpretations of the subterranean events.
Constellation
HD Video / 01:33 min / loop / 2017
The inability to comprehend the complexity of our world if not through a look into the face of others is one of the underlying ideas for the work Constellation, in which 16mm films are used as 360° scans to create portraits of friends and companions, thus building a personal archive of confidants. Displayed in a ring shaped projection machine, a portrait circles around its physical counterpart, a found stone, that is placed in the center of the machine. Like a satellite system on orbital tracks, the projection machine divides outer space and inner gravitation field. One has to look through the machine to witness the fragile interplay of nature, virtuality and technological enthusiasm in order to find the analog hologram of a flickering human head.