Das Große Rasenstück

»Das Große Rasenstück« [The Large Piece of Turf] references Albrecht Dürer's eponymous watercolor of 1503. However, lying amidst the grasses and flowers here is a soldier firing an assault rifle. Here, the press photograph from a political magazine encounters one of the first nature studies of the Renaissance. Two levels of reality which are supplemented by a third: that of the computer game. The scene is framed by smaller images of war, reminiscent of the design of computer games. A quote from Jean Baudrillard draws attention to the game being played with the levels of reality: »In simulation the sign is indistinguishable from reality«. In addition, floating islands from the movie »Avatar« can be seen in the border: reality as representation, not as reality per se.

The tapestry's motif was generated by computer, and here the medium has strong connections with the contents. Its production as a complex jacquard fabric refers back to an early precursor of computer technology: the weaving process on the Jacquard loom, like the binary code, is based on 1s and 0s.