Stefan Karrer
Stefan Karrer is endowed with a subtle sense of poetics and irony, which he uses to sharply critique contemporary digital and online culture. Beneath the seemingly mundane images and topics he examines lie significant social transformations shaped by current media technologies.
In Cool clouds that look like they should be spelling something, but they don't (2016), Karrer creates an automated desktop performance that takes viewers through his archive of found images and captions from Flickr. By navigating user-added captions, a computer voice recites these online "crazy," "cool," or "lonely" clouds, confronting viewers with online phenomena that become increasingly detached from reality. In this context, nature becomes mediated, abstracted, and part of networked social communications.
Karrer further explores how truth and reality are shaped by online culture and communication in Calypso Cave (2021). In this work, the artist collects and compiles over ten years of Instagram images and their captions, documenting how users have shared pictures of the "wrong" Calypso Cave, which had been closed to the public after a partial collapse in 2010—shortly after Instagram was launched.
Through strategies of appropriation and experimental writing, Karrer investigates the power of networked technologies, the politics and poetics of the internet, and our consumption of online media. The jury was impressed by the artist’s punctual ability to address social and political issues related to networked media, through his ironic and witty, yet delicate and poetic transformations of the source material.