The featured work is part of the Robot Partner, a long-term multidisciplinary project combining art, science, humanities and technology. It functions as a conceptual frame for Doepner’s recent artistic work through which he deals with complexity, and the notion of partnership in general as well as between humans and machines. The project deals in an investigative, poetic, witty and absurd way with contemporary ideals, ideas and images of progress. The notions of partnership and of progress, which in our society is closely connected with the notion of development and technology, is in Doepner's work often represented in constructed everyday situations and through artificial creatures and their functioning. Everyday situations are disturbed, and familiar objects are taken from their usual context and charged with new tasks and meanings, interrupting the observer’s perceptual routine.
autoSpoon – A Fragment of Living Kitchen - Happy End of the 21st CenturyStefan Doepner (DE/SI)
objekt, 2010
Stefan Doepner (DE/SI)
Stefan Doepner (1966) is one of the founders of the f18institut (1996). He has been working and living in Ljubljana, Slovenia since 2004. Doepner's focus lies on the artistic exploration of today's use, reception and rules of technology. He believes it is necessary to deconstruct and rebuild contemporary systems and the techniques that mark our daily life with ourown individual means and in our own way. His reinventions take the shape of building his own technological tools, as well of building/constructing poetic situations in which our daily routine, a type of machinery, is interrupted. Doepner / f18 institut has collaborated with many artists as well as art institutions and presented work at galleries and festivals worldwide (Synthetic Times, Being; Ars Electronica Festival, Linz / Kapelica Gallery as Featured Art Scene; Shift Festival, Basel).