Lotte Geeven – Walter

Lotte Geeven – Walter

Lotte Geeven (1980) is a multimedia artist. She creates adventurous portraits of the human relation to intangible subjects, such as the sky or the earth. In search of places where this relation deviates, she travels the world. At different locations and with the help of experts, she studies and reveals the mechanisms of our attempts to understand and control these complex matters. The results of her research are minimal portraits that provide another position towards subjects that we thought we already understood. Geeven adopts a position that respects the mystery of things. Geeven does not believe in a specific creative signature, but lets the location dictate the form and medium of her work. Her role in any project is chameleon like. If needed she is an anthropologist, geologist, thief or salesperson. Her work was shown in several museums and galleries in New York, Berlin, London, China, Japan , Indonesia and Canada. In 2010, Geeven was awarded with the Illy Prize, for most innovative artist.

For TodaysArt, she created the new piece Walter in collaboration with Thomas Grill; an oracle-algorithm that gives the sea a voice. The cube-shaped talking computer Walter meticulously observes the sea in motion through its lens and connects all the different sea-states to our language. At daytime, the digital oracle reads the ocean as neutral to positive, whereas clouded periods, dawn and nighttime will darken its’ vocabulary as the light diminishes. In this piece, the sea is perceived as a giant living entity with many moods and faces. These moods narrate words with an ancient connection, emitting fine-tuned word-clouds of closely related words with ancient ties in etymology, and a psycho-linguistic link. For instance, a bright and calm sea will cause peacefully spoken, light, bright words such as lotus or lemonade, while a dark and dynamic sea will be furious and speak of terror and loss. The voice of Walter reacts to the surface of the sea, whispering when the sea is calm, and shouting during violent storms, so that at the end of The Pier one can hear the sea speak for the first time. 


Algorithm: Dr. Thomas Grill.

Design Walter + production: Miriam van Eck.

Book: Edwin van Gender, mainstudio.
Research: Kindly advised by Mag. Dr. Brigitte Krenn; specialized in Computational Linguistics, Literature, Psychology and Philosophy