Static Tensions – Oliver Raschka City Spaces. Changing. Mass Media Advertising. Ruling. Fictional Reality. Facing. Static Tensions. Growing. Visual Overload. Drifting. A Storm of Light and Shadows. 24/7. Noise. Living in a city, we are used to the constant availability of shopping and leisure opportunities. This may be taken for granted in Western civilization. However, our relationship to the omnipresence of mass media and advertising in urban spaces is ambivalent. In a positive way, media and advertising means prosperity, knowledge and modernity. But with the city being a shopping temple we also have to deal with issues of information and sensory overload, social exclusion and cultural decline. Which aspect prevails often depends on the situation and varies over time. Thereby, our view depends on (fundamental questions of) the understanding of the social and economic order and culture of our society. The embedding of mass media spaces into the adjacent urban architecture of buildings, shop windows, subway stations, and market places is where STATIC TENSIONS sets in. The series focusses on the visual overload of the individual due to an artificially created dream world. While walking the shopping streets, the actual urban surroundings merge with the fictional media world of advertising and create something new. The massive promulgation through the mass media in public spaces, on buildings and in streets fundamentally changes their quality, function, and atmosphere. Thus social and cultural aspects step back behind the representation and functionality of uniform products and services. Societal affiliation through individualization in a standardised world is one of the key messages. In a figurative sense STATIC TENSIONS stands for the fact that we live in times of global and local tensions. Personal, sociological, cultural, territorial and economic developments influence the individual and the society. STATIC TENSIONS, a well-known term in mechanics, describes the point at which material breaks. This can be interpreted as a situation when viewpoints become blurred. The images shown reflect the visual overload of the individual by intense black and white contrasts, photographic reduction and compaction of the motifs on site, and unusual perspectives. Image pairs, which often seem to be very unconventional acting collages, highlight the confusion of senses. STATIC TENSIONS is an example of how well-known urban traces can be found and interpreted. The images may not only engage people in the hidden beauty of their personal environment but also in the meaning of objects and media concepts of public spaces. Although there are no real people in the images, it is intriguing to recognize that man determines his entire environment. As a result, STATIC TENSIONS shows the transformation of everyday motifs into an art form, without losing their urban rawness. Oliver Raschka (born 1975 in Stuttgart) studied industrial economics and economic psychology. The overall topic of his photographic work is the disclosure of urban structures and patterns lying beneath human perception. His works have been published in group- and solo exhibitions and in national and international magazines.
Oliver Raschka is an emerging artist from Stuttgart, Germany. He studied economics and psychology. As a photographic autodidact he trained himself through numerous workshops with renowned photographers. He loves black-and-white photography, coffee is the drug of his choice, and loud rock music is what he likes. His photographs have been widely published in group and individual exhibitions as well as in international and national journals.
