Developer Diary 5 - Lockdown again

For the second time this year, the gates and doors of all cultural institutions have been closed.

I know that many artists are afraid for their existence and I have always stood on the edge of the subsistence level with my painting myself, especially small visual artists and small designers cannot put anything back and are dependent on their partners in these Corona times or rely on government aid. And once it gets that far, the artistic career is usually badly affected. In many places there is a lack of sufficient recognition. Without recognition, there is no self-confidence. Without self-confidence, there is no courage for new ideas.

A dinosaur as a bearer of hope

Corona will probably be with us for a while, whether we want to or not.Whining and lamenting won't get you anywhere anyway, so why not play with the new situation? Yesterday evening I discovered a large dinosaur figure in front of our state museum (it is a Seismosaurus), a dinosaur exhibition is to take place in the state museum in December. This is a topic that will potentially attract more visitors to the museum, especially me, because I just love dinosaurs, but that's not what I want to tell. The point is this figure stands outside and gave us great pleasure on one of our evening walks. And I think that’s a lot in times like this.

Outdoor Art

We, the unknown artists, are used to using urban spaces for our exhibitions, such as old cinemas, factory sites or expo pavilions. I myself have already sold my works directly from construction fences. Or from a city wall that served as an exhibition space on some warm days. What is meant here is the “Kunstufer in Hanover”, the city wall on the leash, where you could hang your works of art on the wall every Saturday when the old town flea market took place.

So many people there were in contact with "art" who would never have visited an exhibition, not even small private ones. I went to this wall ten years ago with a box. In the box were paintings that I sold there. The time brought Sascha to paint himself and made large stretcher bags out of the cardboard box with which we transported our paintings. The canvases were turned into records, floppy disks, wood, and the stretcher pockets turned into a studio with shop windows in the middle of the city center. I always enjoy going to the wall to show works of art, but I can understand that not so much appreciation for objects and paintings comes from passers-by. Perhaps our big art houses will soon come up with the idea of ​​bringing more art exhibitions outside in our city. But, we unknown cultural workers can already use the time for ourselves. Whining and spending a certain amount of time on the ground is perfectly fine. But you have to get up again and carry on. I'm really looking forward to all of you’s projects.

We use the time

Although we, Sascha and I, have quite a busy schedule, Sascha is still employed by the city and I have some Christmas work in the pipeline, but the focus is of course on “AC-0209”. Our everyday life is completely determined by the project. We discuss our distribution of tasks, we find financing options (by the way, our meeting for prototype funding at Nordmedia went very well, we will report to you when the results are official). Work on the story is currently in its final phase, which involves a lot of discussion and a lot of coffee. The puzzle structures are already being constructed for the entire game. Countless backdrops and objects have been sketched by me and are now waiting to be worked out. But you always want input from different directions and, of course, even with such a long project, I sometimes need small successes, partial goals are not possible every month in such a project. To keep me happy, I also took part in Inktober for the first time. What is Inktober? An art challenge - every day in October a topic (which is always only one word) is given, and a work then has to be created. You can master this challenge as you like, classically with ink (INKtober, you understand? ;-)) or completely different, there are no limits to the material fantasies. I was mostly there digitally and often even built in small animations. Sometimes I spent three hours with an October contribution, then only half an hour. And that was very relaxing for me. Because nothing had to be perfect here, it was just cheerful finger exercises. What can I finally say? It's a stupid and sometimes scary time, but it's time, our time and we won't get it back, so get out what works. By the way, here are my October posts, as they were seen on Instagram in October: