Client: Cultural Office of the City of Nuremberg (Die Blaue Nacht / Blue Night)

Location: Nuremberg, Germany

Completion date: 2023

Artwork budget: $85,000

Project Team

Head of "Die Blaue Nacht" (Blue Night)

Simone Ruf

City of Nuremberg

Artist (Sculpture and Light)

Stefan Reiss

Studio Stefan Reiss

Artist (Sound)

Steffen Krebber

Construction, Planning, Animations

Karsten Schuhl

Scaffolding

Michael Vogel

Vogel Gerüstbau

Metal construction

Harald Gräbner

Metallbau Gräbner

Beamers and sound system

Sebastian Kamm

Sld Mediatec

Assistant

Kira Schmieg

Assistant

David Mühlberger

Overview

An installation by Stefan Reiss / Sound by Steffen Krebber for “Die Blaue Nacht” 2023 //

TRANSFORMATION XYZ is a huge impressive installation made of scaffolding, ropes, projection and sound, commissioned by the Cultural Office of the City of Nuremberg for the Blue Night 2023. Three scaffolding towers with a height of 10m were erected on the Hauptmarkt, the largest market square in Nuremberg with 5000 sqm. A total of 72 ropes were attached to them by an elaborate metal construction, which were tensioned to the ground over the entire height. By using three high-end beamers and many loudspeakers, a 20-minute virtuoso choreography of animations and sounds was projected onto the ropes, the scaffolding and the surrounding houses, and the entire market square was covered with sound.
Many thanks to the city of Nuremberg, especially the director of the Blue Night: Simone Ruf.

Goals

One of the main goals of the installation was to perform on the huge 5000 sqm Hautpmarkt without the sculptures, the projection and the sound seeming too small and lost by the sheer size of the square. The second goal was to realise this installation within the budget of the city of Nuremberg, which was only possible thanks to excellent partners and their sponsoring. The third and biggest challenge was the technical implementation of the project. In the course of the project planning, the construction behind the ropes was changed several times, as huge metal constructions were impossible within the budget. With the company Gerüstbau Vogel, the coup and breakthrough was then achieved: by means of the scaffolding, on the one hand, safety could be guaranteed and, on the other hand, the tensile force of 1.3 tonnes of the ropes (per tower) could be diverted into the scaffolding.

Process

At the beginning, I developed two ideas that were rejected by a structural engineer because the shapes and gauze stretched between them would have behaved like a sail and become very dangerous in strong winds. To counteract this, I decided once again to use permeable ropes. Until the end of last year, however, it was unclear for a long time how these ropes could be held. Michael Vogel (Scaffolder) enthusiastically joined the project as a sponsor and the idea was born to use scaffolding as a load-bearing construction. Together with Karsten Schuhl, the metal worker Harald Gräbner and the expert ropemaker Erik Frey, more and more details were determined until the final construction was ready in February of this year. Thanks to the great help of everyone involved, a unique work of art was created!

Additional Information

The basis of Stefan Reiss' works are digital drawings consisting exclusively of straight lines, which in the meantime form an archive of over one thousand works. In several steps he translates these drawings into paintings, sculptures and installations. In the artwork "O.T. 1189", he colours the lines and fields by means of a colour alphabet he developed, which translates the Latin letters into different shades of colour on the basis of sound. The digital signs are given a real, haptic form again by spatialising them using ship's ropes and scaffolding. Steffen Krebber's work "Interlace Alpha" questions the auditory representation of space by measuring it with two loudspeakers facing each other. A continuous signal is switched on and off on both loudspeakers in so-called spectral rhythms, which, in addition to a non-discrete temporal division, also entail a weighting of the volume. Due to the movement of the audience in the room and the different distances the sound has to travel to reach the ear, the rhythms each overlap differently.