SHADOWS:ULTRA
Digital video, color, sound, 9’ 30”, 2019 (Germany)
Created by Thomas Hawranke
Introduced by Luca Miranda
Shadows:ULTRA shows overlapping animal shadows within the Dunia game engine, a software fork of CryEngine designed by Kirmaan Aboobaker while working at Crytek. Thomas Hawranke filmed the individual images from the monitor with a Kodak Tri-X 7266 eight millimeter camera, and subsequently exposed, cut, and again digitized the film material. The limited resolution of the shadow maps within the game engine is negated by the grain of the film material. The soundtrack was created by assembling various field recordings created in the 1930s by Ludwig Koch, a musician and animal voice collector.
Born in 1977 in Bergisch Gladbach, Germany, Thomas Hawranke is a media artist and researcher whose practice investigates the influence of technology on society and the impact of computational logic onto human relationships. In his eclectic interventions, Hawranke operates at the intersection of performance and video art: a central concern in his practice is bringing to the surface the ideologies that inform everyday life. Hawranke graduated in Media Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and is currently finishing his practice-based PhD at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Germany, with a dissertation on the modification of video games, also known as modding, as a method for artistic research. Since 2005, he has been a member of Susigames, an independent art label founded in 2003 that investigates alternative gaming’s approaches, and he is the co-founder of the Paidia Institute in Cologne. His works have been presented at several exhibitions and festivals, including the Next Level Festival in Essen and the Weltkunstzimmer in Düsseldorf. Hawranke lives and works in Cologne, Germany.
