Interview with Ursa Schoepper
What sparked your interest in science and how has that background influenced your approach to photography and art?
There are various aspects that artistically motivated me to choose photography. I grew up as a curious little girl in a beautiful landscape, near the Eggegebirge. My parents made me aware of the beauty of nature and my mother shared her passion for art with me. That's why I first studied biology. I was amazed at how beautiful the internal anatomy of a leaf, for example, looked. The cellular structure was real and at the same time reminiscent of abstract paintings. As a student, I had to draw these structures that I saw in the microscope. It became more helpful if they could be photographed.
You made a significant shift from natural sciences to cultural management and eventually to experimental fine art photography. Can you describe what motivated this transition?
My love of art was strongly influenced by my mother, who, for example, showed me illustrations of classical modernism or Dutch masters in art books at a very early age. So in later years I regularly visited art exhibitions in the Rhineland since I now lived there. Art became more and more important to me. As a student, I regularly developed a cultural program for the au pairs in Bonn and realized how important it is to provide cultural offerings. Therefore, I decided to study art science with the aim of working as a cultural manager. As a cultural manager in cultural education, our projects often required images that I made myself. These experimental photographs attracted the attention of experts. They encouraged me to professionalize this particular method of digital, experimental photography.
In your statement, you mention destroying familiar ways of seeing through transformation. Can you elaborate on your creative process and how you decide which images to transform?
„What you see out the window is not the world of life” (Vilém Flusser). New order - New seeing, a digital, experimental photography is for me a metaphor for change. You have to differentiate between seeing something new and having the opportunity to see something in a new way, new, exposed structures, a new form, new connections and networks. This visualization does not show a different world, but rather helps to create a different attitude towards the world. My continuous work of seeing is recorded through a photograph of the intensity of my senses, and transformed through creative work of my mind, my soul. It is the modification of the optical impression of the world of objects through a transcendent mathematics of the soul. This is one of the prerequisite for my artistic work. The limitless beauty of creation, its inherent formal order makes me search for the formula of perfection. Deciding which image I transform is determined by a topic I'm working on. It is also mainly nature that is worth protecting and that impresses me with its diversity.
How do you incorporate algorithmic structures into your artwork, and what challenges do you face in blending technology with traditional photography?
When taking a photograph, the light is stored digitally, creating a representation of the subject in a structured arrangement of bits and bytes. The mathematical tools make it possible to capture abstract things, i.e. the sequence of bits and bytes, into images and to refer to a new, different reality.
A comparison with a symphony, another system, can illustrate interesting connections. The perceived music corresponds to the image. The score of the symphony can be compared to the digital representation. The notes in the score can be accentuated differently and individual passages for selected instruments can be particularly highlighted. This means that a new piece of music can be created based on the score. As an artist, I am in this case composer and conductor at the same time.
Through my analysis of digital photography in terms of its technical, mathematical and physical properties, I quickly realized which photographic images or excerpts I needed to convey the image message that I wanted to portray in terms of content. Photo art, especially computer-aided photo art, is a construct, i.e. a pictorial description of networked systems, of orders such as light - matter - mind - relationships on the one hand and physical - computational processes on the other. In my photographic work, abstraction means addressing the relationship between the observed world and the image created.
You speak of transforming real objects into abstract artworks. Could you give an example of a piece where this transformation was particularly meaningful to you?
During the physical-mathematical analysis of a digital photograph of a white curtain through which I had sent a lot of light, I initially only had the white curtain as an image. However, it is said that digital photography stores every light and color value. I asked myself, where are the color values of the light spectrum? And I started to act algorithmically. I changed contrast values, brightness values, I interpolated to get closer to the inner structures and as a result I achieved the inner stored structures that my white curtain abstractly depicted.Those were my first experimental steps. See also the picture „step by step“.
Your work involves creating virtual realities in photography. How do you balance the line between realistic and abstract in your creations?
This is a philosophical question. For me, real means that it is what I perceive and can verify outside of myself in reality. But reality also has many faces. The basic assumption of radical constructivism is that personal perception does not represent a reflection of reality, but that reality is for each individual a construct of their sensory perceptions and memory performance.Likewise, abstract is a comprehensive term. Virtual means that it potentially exists in reality.
Physiological vision plays a subordinate role in the creation of my experimental photographic art. What is crucial is the inward-looking vision, the imagination. It is not a finished work, but rather an artistic idea in progress. It means for me thinking without reason, rearrange through experimentation. It is a breaking down of perceptual routines. As a phantom of light, digital photography becomes the carrier of an artistic vision. Figures of things emerge. The eye does not see objective, real things, but figures of things that can mean other things. It's a metamorphosis. The resulting digital, abstract photographic work of art shows a transformation, a metamorphosis. It refers to being and appearance. What we see as digital artwork is not Image of reality and yet possible, therefore existing, therefore virtual.
How has your experience in cultural management and project conception influenced your artistic endeavors, particularly in the realm of new media?
The new media give human being the chance to use it creatively as a tool. My projects, which I designed as a cultural manager and implemented as a team in the context of cultural education, show this as an example, https://www.virtuelledenkraeume.de/seite2.html. For example, we developed a Museum der abwesenden Bilder.
Since 2003, you've been primarily focused on photographic art, achieving international recognition and numerous awards. How has your artistic style and approach evolved over these years, and what do you consider your most significant milestones or breakthroughs during this period?
During my cultural management studies, I studied comparative literature as a second subject. This comparative attitude also influences my artistic work. What is the difference between analogue photography and digital photography? What influenced the constructivists, how do I compare this content today? For example, I don't want to dismantle the visible world, but rather rearrange it. A new order can be encouraging. After an initial intensive examination of digital photography, I dealt with topics that could be interesting from an art historical perspective in a social context, for example I focus on nature that is worthy of protection. Experimental computer-aided photography in the sense of photographic art is also the liberation of images through the image. This means turning away from traditional viewing habits and perspectives and the desire for productive viewing. It means dialogue and communication.
With your extensive educational background, how do you see the role of formal education in developing as an artist, especially in fields like fine art photography and new media?
The formal training for artistic development can actually only be formal, that is, imparting art historical knowledge, gaining knowledge of the art market and mastering the various techniques. Intellectual and creative abilities develop in the course of personal development, provided the appropriate disposition is present. Students at the academies should not allow their own artistic ideas to be dictated too much by the lecturers. They should be able to remain free and independent in their thoughts and actions.
You mention the 'seeing eye in harmony with the vibrating soul' as your guiding principle. Could you delve deeper into the philosophical or spiritual aspects that drive your artistic vision?
As an artist, I try to be in the world with all my senses open, in a world that sometimes seems to be going out of control. For me, analyzing and rearranging seems to be a way of encouraging people to discover new ways. My aim is not to dissolve the visible, as in cubism, but rather to create new possibilities for a changed perception through the creation of structured image elements similar to dance. A reconfiguration initially means a disruption of the view, a shift, an unmasking and replacement of previous ways of seeing and perception, and at the same time a previously unknown possibility. It is about artistic reflection and artistic visualization of a construction of the world using the means of observation. And yet “we notice that we are participating in the uncertain game of perception…”, Hans Belting. The viewer's view of the world is infinite in the diversity of its possibilities. My artistic activity is a free design according to my own laws of perception and imagination. It manifests itself in a clear blueprint of a consciousness, a world consciousness. There is the courage for freedom that keeps alternatives open and encourages innovation, which at the same time does not negate archaic, traditional perspectives. Freedom of man through art can mean that man is free from the well-rehearsed typification of other ways of experiencing the world.
