Every 4 Seconds, Lower Manhattan: Wolfgang Staehle at Postmasters, 2001
On September 6, 2001, Postmasters Gallery opened a show of live webcam projections by net art pioneer Wolfgang Staehle: a German monastery, the Berlin TV tower and the skyline of Lower Manhattan. 5 days later, the work kept watching.
On September 6, 2001, Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea opened 2001, Wolfgang Staehle's first solo show in New York in 10 years. Born in Stuttgart in 1950 and living in New York since 1976, Staehle had founded The Thing in 1991, a bulletin board system that grew into one of the key forums for early net art. His previous piece, Empire 24/7, had streamed a live image of the Empire State Building, a Warholian update of the landscape genre shown in net_condition at ZKM in Karlsruhe.
The new show had 3 live feeds, sent over the internet to the gallery around the clock: the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the medieval Comburg monastery near Schwaebisch Hall, where Staehle grew up, and a monumental 2 screen panorama of Lower Manhattan seen from Brooklyn. Each image refreshed every 4 seconds. The press release promised "a reflective slowdown of beautiful images," pictures "static and changing at the same time." On the wall, an epigraph from Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics asked what becomes of time once any event, anywhere, can be seen at any speed.
5 days later the camera was still running. Postmasters' Magdalena Sawon wrote on September 20: "Until last Monday one could see a beautiful scene of the iconic New York skyline, with boats and blimps and incredible sunsets as the day progressed. Tuesday morning it looked like our world ended as the projection captured all stages of the catastrophe." The feed stayed on, showing "the transformed skyline with a disorienting gap where the towers stood before." The key intent of the work, she wrote, "was (and remains) to continuously stream in an unedited and unaltered reality." To her knowledge it was the only artwork whose content, not only its context, was changed directly by the attack.
The panorama, now titled Untitled, 2001, is part of Rhizome's Net Art Anthology. It is not shown online, only in galleries as a 48 or 72 hour loop. It remains one of the clearest lessons in what a live feed is: a work that does not know what it will show next, made by an artist who simply pointed a camera at a city and let time do the rest.
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