Google Earth Book, Teresa Mayr

When Caspar David Friedrich went out into nature to draw and gather material for his paintings, he liked to note on the sheets, next to the sketch of a tree or landscape, the number of hours he had spent drawing. So, apparently he saw it as a "live" experience to which he wanted to expose himself with full concentration in order to miss as little as possible. Holding out for three, four, or five-and-a-half hours while keeping a close eye on an environment in which always something moves is already a major achievement in itself.

One could well imagine Teresa Mayr also noting down a time indication in the margin of each of her drawings. Perhaps one even looks for one. Because she documents what happens on a computer screen; so, while drawing, she in turn is involved "live" – in something that is much more ephemeral than trees and landscapes. Here, a completely new image can emerge from one moment to the next, and anyone who scrolls, switches from one tab to the next, or might even have several programs running simultaneously, can hardly keep up with the task of capturing this in a drawing. Accordingly, Mayr's drawings do not show a homogeneous image space but rather a confluence of fragments from different screen surfaces: A view from Google Earth, a WhatsApp message, an Instagram post, a text file, the result of an image search – all this and much more can appear on the same sheet, even overlap, and thus increase one's awareness of how many different things one is offered almost simultaneously on one screen. Most of it also calls for interaction, at least entices you to get involved directly, and so anyone sitting in front of a desktop or looking at their smartphone is always already in multitasking mode. Teresa Mayr's drawings represent the artistic reflection about and coming to fruition of all this; in many delicate strokes that often almost seem to be dancing, they visualize the "agility," and indeed the velocity, of the goings-on on a screen.

For many people, looking at screens is their everyday life; in purely temporal terms, it may even constitute their first reality. It's where they learn news from around the world, exchange private messages, inform themselves and converse with others. Via screen, they experience at least as much as they used to when they went outdoors and set off on walks or journeys. So it's only natural now to rather capture what can be seen on screens than to draw in nature. This leaves the "added value" of drawing unchanged: It immobilizes something one is otherwise actively connected with, and not even specifically aware of as long as one lives in and with it. Just as a peasant in Caspar David Friedrich's time worked in nature and was only able to see his living world as such through drawings of trees or landscape paintings, today digital natives also need drawings or other static images without interactive features to be able to recognize what shapes their own reality at all.

Since, in works such as "google earth book," Teresa Mayr takes up subjects that one has conventionally encountered on journeys, indeed since she shows precisely what one has long experienced as a sight on a grand tour or on walks, she herself establishes a connection between the analog past and the digital present. And since she uses the virtually timeless medium of drawing for this purpose, she even postulates a continuity between the two supposedly so different modalities of experiencing the world. Her 'Trips on Screen' thus continue a long history of appropriating what is in itself already one's own, yet as such must first be seen from a distance before one actually realizes it.

Published by Fantôme Verlag
Softcover 
40 pages
210 x 297 mm 
ISBN 9783940999580