Ursula Damm, Transits

The installation Transits, produced for the HeK exhibition Sensing Place in 2012, uses 24 hours of video footage of Aeschenplatz in Basel to record traces of passers-by at an urban traffic intersection, and to make their characteristics visible. Software developed especially for this purpose  (by Martin Schneider) grasps the entire video image as a neural network map (Kohonen map). Every pixel of the video image is saved and then "remembered" or processed using special algorithms. On one hand we wanted long-abiding elements to be part of the picture; but on the other hand, this image processing also has its own dynamics: Colors are drawn to each other, and movements push pixels in the recognized direction. The resulting image fluctuates between a description of specific local events and the dynamics of image processing, as attributed to our brain, here preempted by software. 

(Text: Ursula Damm)

Ursula Damm (*1960), Germany, lives and works in Weimar and Berlin.

She is a professor of media environments at the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Originally trained as a sculptor, she is now increasingly applying media-based techniques and methods of neuroscience to her installations. Her works often deal with the collective structures governing social interactions between organisms (humans and animals) in their environments.