Detlev Fischer: Biographical note

Detlev Fischer (*1961) studied art at the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg and at Coventry Unversity, School of Art & Design. After focusing on experimental film, he developed ‘Schwamm’ (sponge), an extensive open-ended interactive and collaborative project including texts, drawings and scripts. Schwamm was included in several exhibitions, for example, Welt als Schrift (Literaturhaus Hamburg, 1990), Interface I (1990, International symposium for electronic art and creativity, Hamburg), Wörter brauchen keine Seiten (1993, Literaturhaus Wien), and Künstliche Spiele (1993, Literaturhaus München).

After studying and working in Coventry, UK between 1992 and 1996, the artist turned to photography and montage. This resulted in several series of photographic composites simulating street photography snapshots, such as ‘Strassenszenen’ and ‘Hafentreppe’. Around this time, the author abandoned interactive and conversational art (see also Laikologie, in German).

In the most recent work such as ‘Secret Ballet’ (composed between 2000 and 2004 and published by Salon Verlag) the artist uses his memory as a ‘body of resonance’ that helps a large repository of dictionary example sentences settle into a narrative structure. Writing proper has been replaced by the placement of given sentence elements within an expanding body of text in response to the resulting modulations of meaning, forcing their subtly dislocating or disquieting co-existence. The result reflects on a material level the preoccupations and ideologies of the 70’s and 80’s from which the example sentences are largely drawn.

The latest visual art work, such as the computer-based drawing ‘The rug’, also employs a resonance approach.