PENNY W. STAMPS SPEAKER SERIES

Unless otherwise noted, all programs take place on Thursdays at 5:10 pm at the historic Michigan Theater, located at 603 E. Liberty Street in downtown Ann Arbor, and are free of charge and open to the public.

March 29, 2007

Franz John

Kunstkompatible Projekte

Franz John works with human and mechanical interfaces, using both new and old media to identify the barely noticeable and visualize it, making the unobservable visible through large scale installations which engage, variously, architecture, place, or geological phenomena. For instance Military Eyes, in which he transformed disused military bunkers surrounding the Golden Gate Bridge into huge walk-in Camera Obscuras. Another project, Salt Axis, stretches 55 miles overland, creating awareness of the subterranean salt deposits laid down by an evaporated ancient ocean in Muensterland, Germany. One of his recent projects, Turing Tables, was shown last year at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA to mark the centennial of the Great Earthquake of 1906. According to the artist, this installation examines online and live "the archaic feeling and consciousness that the earth is an organism, that it moves and that it can be understood as an organism in constant flux."

Co-sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and U-M Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.