Description

An alpine meadow at home

Monica Studer (b. 1960) and Christoph van den Berg (b. 1962) have been developing their highly acclaimed internet project Hotel Vue des Alpes (www.vuedesalpes.com) since 2000. The project offers visitors an opportunity to spend a virtual vacation on the Web. Studer and van den Berg thereby investigate the internet as a (non-) place and explore the potential for travel in cyberspace. The alpine landscape that registered hotel guests see around them is deceptively real. In fact, however, it is all pure invention and has been digitally constructed by the artist couple. The somewhat old-fashioned look of the buildings is explained by the fact that Studer and van den Berg have made memory a fundamental principle of their work. When constructing individual motifs, the artists draw upon their own childhood souvenirs of vacations in the Swiss Alps.

The Art Edition Wiese is taken from an installation shown at the Fondation Beyeler in 2010, in which the computer-generated elements of a virtual alpine meadow were continually and randomly recombined. This Art Edition Wiese is thus a brief snapshot of the meadow from the Hotel Vue des Alpes.