ZEITGUISED is an influential art and design studio for audio-visual spatial installations at the intersection of virtual and physical space.
The studio's signature is post-poetic, digitally abstract narrations in innovative photoreal collage styles, often a blend of recognizable unassuming objects in unaccustomed environments, and vice versa. Self-labeling their work as virtual prosthetics shows their intent to corrupt the tropes of vandalism with digital means, as their ambiguous and exquisite work draws from the infinite recombination capacity of digital mash-up culture, multiplied by the manipulation potential of virtual real-time 3D tools. Using seductive photographic simulation, ZEITGUISED is widely regarded as the handcraft-based originator of a hallucinative transformation style that is now the signature of AI image production. These post-narrative modes of structural transformations, evoking mental states of manic order and complex instability, have been made up by the studio’s natively digital vocabulary of forms and processes that walks a precarious line, availing itself of the aesthetic languages of both fine art and commercial industries, disintegrating either. As surface phenomena become the content and unstable generative processes of color, material, shape, and spatial structures become storyline and protagonist simultaneously, the dichotomy between cognitive imagination and rational observation is exposed and evaporated as the same mental figment.
With the post-poetic The Zoo (2004) and Peripetics (2008), ZEITGUISED initiated a genre that has flourished in the realm of digital art and motion design. geist.xyz (2016) is one of the first natively virtual textile design projects that inspired a new generation of virtual garment designers and has been acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, into their permanent digital collection (2021).
ZEITGUISED's work has been presented in numerous international media festivals like ZKM, Onedotzero, Dotmov, Nemo, ITFS, Toronto, and Resfest.
ZEITGUISED was nominated for two Media Art Awards at the ZKM Karlsruhe in 2001 and 2002. In 2005, they received the award for Best Music Video at the International Film Festival Oberhausen and, later that year, the Best Design Award at Resfest. In 2009, they received the award for Best Experimental Work at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and in 2010, they were a finalist in the Experimental section of the Vimeo Festival+Awards in NYC. They hold two Laus Awards from 2014 and 2015 and two honorable mentions at Ars Electronica. In 2016, they won Best Experimental and Best VFX, both at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival, and Bronze at Ciclope Festival Berlin.
Selected work by ZEITGUISED has been shown in galleries and art shows around the world, most notably La Gaite Lyrique Paris, Volta Art Fair New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona, Marta Herford, Vitra Design Museum Weil am Rhein, Somerset House London, Yuz Museum Shanghai, and Palazzo Reale in Milan.
