... and I am a part
Media Art Piece

DemoVideo 5 min. MediaPlayer (9 MB), Description PDF-File (3 MB)

For this performative work-in-progress, the media artist Wolf Helzle from Stuttgart takes photographs of people’s faces all over the world. At last count (October 2005) his database contained just about 16,000 portraits of people from various countries in Europe, and from Japan, Korea, and Zambia—and the number continues to grow. Helzle pursues the question that has moved him for a very long time: “How can I understand the relationship between myself as an individual and all of humankind, these six billion human beings?” The question originates from 1963, the year in which the first photograph of our planet was beamed to Earth by a satellite. This opened up a space for the public at large beyond all previously known boundaries. And our familiar relationships to the family, to work, to the town, region, and country we live in, etc., were extended by precisely this question. What does it mean to be one six-billionth of the world’s population? How can I picture humankind in its entirety? How does this affect my life in a practical way?

It is not enough that the economy, technology, terrorism, etc., have taken hold of this space; it is advisable that we work out ideas about how we deal with it as individuals. This “global” space contains opportunities and potentials that do not exist within known (national) boundaries. And because artists are responsible for images...

"In the process of understanding and interpretation, part and whole are related in a circular way: in order to understand the whole, it is necessary to understand the parts, while to understand the parts it is necessary to have some comprehension of the whole.”

David Couzens Hoy, cited in Ken Wilber, The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1997), p. 96.

To do this, Wolf Helzle sets up his mobile photo studio, complete with a computer, and asks visitors, guests or passers-by to sit down on a chair before a black background. He takes their photographs and enters the data into a computer, where he then processes it with software developed specifically for this performance. A face recognition program fixes various points on each face, and the portraits are then projected onto a suitable surface (the façade of a building, a screen) measuring at least six by five meters. However, not only the photographed faces are shown, but also the transitions from face to face calculated in real time. Each subsequent image is seamlessly inserted into the projection; the sequence of the faces changes continuously.

Wolf Helzle often produces this work in collaboration with different musicians, thus entering the sphere of the relatively young genre of Visual Music. He can change the speed of the sequence of faces in real time, in this way producing a close correlation between the music/rhythm and the images.

Andreas Langen (excerpt):

"As an artist, Wolf Helzle deals with a subject that became his second nature as soon as he took his first breath, for he was born a twin, and his photographs look into the relationship between the individual and the whole.

We need all of humankind, the company of those like us, almost as much as we need our daily bread. If we lose them, we risk going mad, as demonstrated by Robinson Crusoe’s will-o’-the-wisp communication with his companion in desperation Friday. He who relinquishes the community, driven, for example, by religious fervor, quickly comes up against evil spirits. And if he personifies God: Jesus fasted alone in the desert and he promptly encountered the devil himself.

Just what is the meaning of individuality, particularly since in our day and age and in our circles the personal is constantly extolled, and ubiquitous, ridiculous commercial messages take mass products to market and label them “exclusive”? And what is the meaning of the tension between the individual, which separates me, and the mutual, which connects me, during the process of being photographed? A process that only appears to be a small, commonplace matter as practiced by Wolf Helzle: light from the front, sit down for a moment, look straight into the lens, flash, the passport photo is ready. Helzle’s electronic archive meanwhile contains nearly 16,000 portraits of this kind, taken between Stuttgart and Tokyo at town festivals, art exhibitions, corporate events—and one notices the same thing time and again, regardless of whether the portrait is of a high-level manager or a homeless person: this moment before the camera coincides with deep-seated questions, for instance “What image do I project?” Or going even further, “Who am I?” Many people react to this situation with visible strain. Wolf Helzle’s response is loving: he makes an effort to exude personal warmth, speaks in a deliberately calm and friendly way, and as soon as the portrait has been taken, he applies a small sticker to the person’s lapel. From a practical point of view, this serves to be able to recognize whom he has already taken a photograph of; in actual fact, however, he does this in order to physically—and literally—touch the person opposite him.

One can easily consider all this to be naive, especially since the images that are produced in this way do not hide behind demanding complexity. What you see is what you get—human faces. This art does not stand in solitary splendor high above the heads of average people. On the contrary: it consists of precisely these heads, lots of everyday faces without makeup, sometimes even painfully close to reality. Wolf Helzle regards this collecting of faces as bowing before the infinite variety of human beings, and one is again tempted to think of this almost child-like amazement as naive or superficial. But quite apart from the fact that the faces blending into each other electronically also have very threatening aspects—some viewers see Frankenstein-like creatures or sinister visions of genetically manipulated monsters—when one thinks about it more carefully, it becomes evident how enormous the apparently simple subject is."