Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau


Daniele Perra: You both had very different forms of training. When and how did you get interested in art in relation to the development of new technologies and new media?

Christa Sommerer: Before I became interested in modern art, sculpture, and installation I studied biology, botany, and anthropology. Even at that stage I was interested in combining science and art. Unfortunately, due to the inflexible nature of our education system, I had to make a choice: scientist or artist. This choice always felt restrictive, because I wanted to do both. Trying to incorporate the ideas and principles of botany, I created some early works—series of reliefs, sculptures, installations—taking the classification scheme of Swedish naturalist and doctor Carl Von Linné as my initial impulse. But I soon found that the heaviness and rigidity of materials such as wood, plaster, polyester, even paper limited my work, and I started looking for a lighter, more modular substance. I considered adopting film, but soon afterwards happened to see some computer generated images, and it seemed to be the perfect medium with which to represent growth and development. In 1992 I attended the Institute for New Media in Frankfurt to study computer graphics and animation…


The full text is published in "tema celeste" No. 84, March-April 2001.




Daniele Perra