Jürg Lehni / Guy Meldem
Flood Fill – Global Warning

With the six video animations that make up Flood Fill – Global Warning, the artists Jürg Lehni and Guy Meldem announce an absurd warning: “Animals & Plants steal our vital energy! Act before it’s too late!” The vital energy is visualized as an empty, geometric net, which a cat, for instance, pulls out of a woman’s brain. 

With the help of a slowed-down Flood Fill algorithm that was already used early on to visualize computer graphics, Lehni builds up the pictures by having the layers of white, gray and black image planes virtually flow into each other, until the original hand-written message becomes visible. The development of the images is always accompanied by a hammering electronic sound. This underlines the uncomfortable urgency of the message, whose absurdity replaces current warnings of flood catastrophes or global warming referred to in the words of the title. Lehni uses an antiquated form of digital drawing as a sort of shading, in order to reenact hand-drawn contents. This points indirectly to the urgent problem of climate change by ironically aiming past it and instead highlighting a meaningless, nonsensical message. 

(Text: Bettina Back)