Fakewhale In Dialogue with Dominic Kießling
In an era dominated by augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and immersive media, German artist Dominic Kießling reminds us that sometimes all it takes to evoke wonder is a hairdryer, a plastic bag, and a bit of air. His kinetic installations, both poetic and elemental, reveal the hidden power of the simplest physical phenomena: the breath of air, the tension of skin, the perpetual cycle of form emerging and dissolving. In this conversation with Fakewhale, we explore his intuitive, improvisation-driven creative process, his journey from motion graphics to experimental minimalism, and his upcoming editorial project.
Fakewhale: Your artistic practice is deeply intuitive, where the work emerges through play with simple materials and physical forces. What role does failure play in your creative process, and how does it shape the final outcome?
Dominic Kießling: Failure or disappointment are very essential elements in my work. Although it feels bad at first, it ultimately helps you understand something better. Especially when you work with material, that is very hard to control. The outcome of experiments with foil and air are very unpredictable, which makes it actually so exciting to work with. But it can also be very frustrating, if you are aiming for a certain goal. Next to failure, there is also coincidence. If an experiment results in something that you never expected, I would not call it a failure. Actually most of my big discoveries were coincidences. Like when I simply forgot to turn off the warm air of my hair dryer and my installation started to fly. This was a very strong moment, where I felt like a child.
For me it is also important that I can do experiments with low investment of time and money. As the rate of failures is quite high in my work, it is very important that I can continue fast and leave the disappointment behind me. And I always try to end my day with a positive experiment.
You work with elemental forces like air, pressure, skin, and gravity, yet your installations evoke profound emotional states. What draws you to these “invisible forces,” and how do you choose the materials that express them?
I always wanted to create creatures. I came across several artists in my life who are doing similar things and it always touched me so much that I had to try something similar on my own. It fascinated me that even very abstract objects that are obviously human made can give you the impression of a living being by only moving in a very certain way. So I was searching for physical principles and ended up with some hair dryers and plastic bags. I was actually inspired by these sky dancers which I actually find very ugly and hectic, but I thought probably this is not the end of the story. I believed there would be more potential in this phenomenon. So this was the initial situation and it quickly became apparent that I just opened the box of pandora. I realized that there is a whole universe of possibilities to be discovered. One very important step was when I found these super thin foils which are actually very cheap one-way products for covering your floor while painting your walls. I really love the contrast of the poetry and vulnerability of the material on one side and its trivial purpose on the other. And yes, they can evoke very strong emotional states. Another beautiful contrast is the cold objectivity and precision of my experiments on the one site and the strong emotional result on the other. The best example for that is my installation “life cycle of a plastic tube” It started with a very simple experiment and resulted in a metaphor of life and death. One funny fact is that the basic elements of installation are the same as for these sky dancers, only with some different physical parameters and it took miles of detours to come back to this initial idea.
Coming from a background in motion graphics and computational design, your current work feels like a form of resistance to technological complexity. Can you tell us more about your shift from digital culture to radical low-tech?
I worked about ten years in a motion design studio in Berlin called Pfadfinderei. We created big stage shows for bands like Moderat or Modeselektor which was very big fun at this time. We were strongly connected to the electronic music scene. My job was to design video and light setups for concerts and events and to design motion content for these media. One big element of my work was to visualize music. It is still a strong passion of mine and I am still doing live video performances with other musicians. One important matter of my studio job that became increasingly difficult for me, was actually my screen time. I was working with software all day long and it became more and more a need for me to work again with analog tools. Before I became a motion designer I was a product designer and I was already used to standing on a workbench. It also gives you a whole new perspective on analogue material if you are used to working with high end three dimensional design tools and timelines, that allow you to go back and forward in time. (I sometimes miss the undo option now.) As a motion designer I was also working with physical simulations, like water and other particle systems and I often thought that it would be cool to do this in reality. Now I see that these 3D-tools gave me a very good understanding of some physics and a lot of other things like material shadings and geometry. These were very good learning lessons. But in analogue space, designing is very different. Also frustrating if you are used to 3D-software. But the results are way more unique which is also a very good reason for my shift from digital design. It is very attractive for me to do the opposite of what the mainstream is doing and so I thought that low-tech is the right direction for me. I am also a great opponent of excess and waste on our planet and it gives me a strong satisfaction to show the world the power of improvisation with very common things.
In Life Cycle of a Plastic Tube, you create an endless loop of birth and dissolution, evoking a kind of mechanical breath. How do you conceive of “artificial life,” and how does that notion influence your aesthetics?
For me artificial life is especially interesting in terms of visual perception. In my case I would rather call it an “illusion of life” or “imitation of life”. I am very fascinated by the fact that our emotional system can be triggered by mechanical objects, like the Life Cycle of a Plastic Tube. Breathing for example is a very strong trigger. It suddenly reminds us of a living being. But even certain static shapes can give the impression of something alive. I just call it “character” then. For me a sculpture is strong, when it has a strong character. When you can not leave it without a name. The artworks by Theo Jansen also inspired me ultimately. Only the imitation of walking limbs creates such a strong feeling, that you suddenly see these constructions as living creatures.
In Cause and Effect, the air waves that move the plastic veil turn the space into a meditative choreography. The piece feels almost like an invisible dance between matter and void. How do you think about movement in the exhibition space, and what role does choreography play in your work?
Already as a motion designer, choreography played a very important role for me. I really love to create time-based visual compositions. Like I mentioned before, I was used to working with timelines within design softwares in the past. With my foil installations I really had to readjust my creative process concerning motion and time. But I feel like I am in heaven when I am now adjusting parameters of my installations and to see the results in real space. I am dreaming of an exhibition where I could compose all these motion artworks to a big choreography. At the moment I am just starting collaborations with different dancers and choreographers who want to interact with my inflatable objects. I really like the idea, that there will be no machine involved anymore, that moves my artworks. Only the dancers and the object. In this case I would be no choreographer anymore, but it will be exciting to see how other performing artists will put these creatures into motion.
Your work with vacuum and negative pressure introduces a dramatic tension between form and fragility: the structure “lives” only as long as the vacuum is sustained. Are you interested in this analogy with living systems? Do you think art has a role in exploring the boundaries between life and non-life?
Yes I truly like these analogies. I am not aiming for them in a direct way but somehow they continuously appear in my work. With the negative pressure it is especially the moment when I turn on the vacuum cleaner and the undefined shape of the plastic bag is uniting with the inner structure. It feels so organic. And then there is the moment when the process of vacuum is finished and you can truly feel the pressure. It also suddenly reminds me of holding my breath and to be inside the bag myself.
Interestingly the whole field of negative pressure also came through a coincidence. It often happens that the airflow of my fans gets stuck by some foil. What felt frustrating at first turned out to be very interesting on the second viewing. When something like this happens I am always between happiness and sadness as it shows you a very tempting path but therefore you have to leave your current one.
Your process is grounded in continuous experimentation and long chains of trial and error. What signals or parameters tell you, “this is the right moment, the work is born”?
This is what I call “character”. When something is craving for your attention. In the first moment it is just an emotion. I just feel that it is good. But the interesting question is, what makes it good? I am thinking a lot about our mechanics of visual perception. I think that strong formal characters are always playing in a poetic way with these basic mechanisms. All objects that surround us are classified through our perception. This happens unconsciously. And then there are objects that can’t be classified easily. It is new, it has an unconventional spin or an overlapping of formal characteristics. There are endless reasons why a certain shape can be strong. I really love disenchanting these objects and to find the objective reason.
Another interesting facet of my trial and error process is that actually with every work that is born, I always co-create the DNA for brothers, sisters and children. The development is never at an end. I like the illustration of the sum of all my work as a concentric circle. Each new work is bulging this circle a bit and so the border to the unknown becomes bigger and bigger. An ever growing family that can even become a new species somewhere.
In your upcoming editorial project, you’re telling the story, through images, of the creative process behind your latest works, developed inside a former factory in Leipzig. How can photographic documentation capture, or betray, the ephemeral and kinetic experience of your installations?
Truly photos cannot transport the same experience as videos, but the book is focusing more on the environment of my work. It is looking behind the scenes. I document every experiment and every failure and so I have an enormous library of photos that show what is behind the glossy results. You also get an impression of the beautiful roughness of my studio at this time with broken windows and raccoons that inspected my installations at night. It is the contrast of these rough conditions and the clean results. Also I want to show the power of curiosity and improvisation that guided me through periods of disappointment and cold winter days.
Your studio often feels more like a physics lab than a traditional art space. Have you ever collaborated, or thought about collaborating, with scientists or physicists? How do you see the dialogue between art and science within your practice?
Maybe there is a scientific field where a collaboration would make sense, but I didn’t find it yet. In the field where I am working at the moment with fluid dynamics I guess a collaboration would not be very helpful. Maybe a specialist could inspire me to new approaches but at the moment my workflow is very efficient and I have many ideas in the pipeline which I already don’t know when I can realize them.
What actually fascinates me a lot are the books by Stephen Hawking. Although I don’t understand so much, it is still an enormous source of inspiration. There are so many unimaginable processes happening in our universe and somehow I feel the need to find analogies between my work and astrophysics. But they actually do not influence my workflow. Only my results can sometimes have a small analogy also to other scientific fields and they can give an interesting new perspective on my work.
Looking ahead, are there new materials or physical forces you’re eager to bring “on stage”? Is there an experiment you haven’t yet realized but has been haunting your imagination for a long time?
For example the cause and effect installation contains a huge potential to be worked out. I imagine a very big wall with a lot of ventilators and obstacles where I can make complex compositions with overlapping wave patterns. Also I guess there will be some very exciting failures. One big problem with this idea is that big foils don’t make beautiful movements anymore on the wall as they become too heavy. But I like these kinds of challenges as they force you to be very flexible and to make strong turns.
Another field that I just started is casting. I love the moment when you expose the cast after a long process of manufacturing the casting mold. I don’t want to make precise reproductions of something that already exists, but to provoke some coincidence. I want the results to be somehow unpredictable and that you can see and feel the process of flowing liquid.
fakewhale
Founded in 2021, Fakewhale advocates the digital art market's evolution. Viewing NFT technology as a container for art, and leveraging the expansive scope of digital culture, Fakewhale strives to shape a new ecosystem in which art and technology become the starting point, rather than the final destination.
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