4.8.-27.8.2023
Opening / Avajaiset 3.8.2023 18-20:00

The Big Crash is an expansive art piece which branches out in many forms, such as painting, electronic art, sound and music, net art, sculpture and installation art. The piece embraces Steiner’s concept of the contemporary interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk and started early 2019.

The thematic departure point for the piece is the instability of the real estate market as a consequence of extreme gentrification. Something that is actively taking place in all bigger cities around the globe. There is a pending ‘big bubble crash’ awaiting as a consequence of this and the piece deals with the growing instability this movement creates and its effects on society.
The Big Crash is intended to grow, and the first parts are based on a software that mines the Internet for real estate data, here websites that work as intermediaries of rented properties, rooms and flats. Berlin was chosen as an example since the market and the city’s gentrification has expanded in such a high speed over the last few years.

The custom software written by Malte Steiner harvests the data of the real estate websites like prices and square-meters, but also the visuals of the advertisements. These are analyzed with a machine learning algorithm, performing an image segmentation and thus separating objects found in these images into picture fragments. These fragmentations will consequently be used in the different forms of the art piece. The Big Crash is also about media transfer, data i.e. can be translated into physical objects and those back in virtual space. Results of image segmentation algorithm are here painted in oil on canvas. The numerical data of the prices i.e. is transferred to MIDI and OSC data to control synthesizers, creating generative soundscapes.

About Malte Steiner
Malte Steiner (born 1970) is a German media artist, electronic musician and composer. He started creating electronic music and visual art around 1983, developing his own vision of the interdisciplinary Gesamtkunstwerk. First exhibitions already in 1983. In 1986 Steiner took a course in electro-acoustic music in Lüneburg by H.W. Erdmann and gave his first concerts in the following years, e. g. in Germany, France and Belgium, and started 1987 to release his music on cassette, later on vinyl, CD and online.

In 1998 he began to create electronic art and installations and additionally in 2003 several net art projects including a collaborative visual networking environment, shown in the Java museum in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Besides diverse music projects Steiner is also involved in several open source projects and has done lectures, radio features and workshops. Artist-In-Residency i.E. in Open City (La Ciudad Abierta) Of Ritoque, Chile 2011 or together with Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen in Ii, Finland 2018.
In 2018 he relocated to Aalborg, Denmark and started in 2019 with the work on the new art project The Big Crash, art for the pending burst of the real estate bubble, reflecting on the housing crisis and gentrification. Art pieces are based on data which a software by Steiner harvest from online real estate ads. For instance images were segmented with the help of a Machine Learning algorithm and the resulting fragments were used for actual 3D printed objects but also in VR. Physical exhibitions of The Big Crash have been in Aarhus and Aalborg, Denmark and Bergen, Norway. The VR part has been shown i.E. at the Sound Campus exhibition of Kunstuniversität Linz at Ars Electronica 2020, at the ICMC 2021 conference, in the digital section of KP22 exhibition Aarhus 2022 and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin 2022.
Also in 2019 he started the conceptional phase of the project absolute power, macht + ohnmacht and painted first paintings. This project reflects on power structures and their mechanisms in politics and society. The first solo exhibition of absolute power was shown 2022 at XM3 Aalborg, Denmark, the installation Rewriting History: I keep forgetting faces at Piksel 22 festival in Bergen, Norway.