Benjamin Tiven

Synthetic Spectra

In his work, Benjamin Tiven elaborates political, technological and economic dimensions of public media, the aesthetics of television when applied to cinema, and the imagined narration of real events. In Büchsenhausen, Tiven originally intended to address current amalgamations of money, art and audio-visual media in a poetic way, through a film production that was planned in the—at the time—abandoned rooms of the Greek state television broadcaster ERT in Athens. Due to a change in circumstances on site, Tiven had to adjust the project and temporarily dismiss the idea of a film production in Athens. Instead, in Büchsenhausen he concentrated on a different but no less controversial thematic field: the late-capitalist production of (economic) value from Big Data and its relationship to time. In this context he wrote an essay, invited German economic journalist and blogger Hannes Grassegger to Innsbruck for a staged discussion, produced several object works in collaboration with Erik Wysocan, and curated a film evening at the Künstlerhaus.