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Christoph Steger // Moving Images








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Senseless Arabesques
Kala Gallery, Berkeley, CAThe installation Senseless Arabesques playfully investigates contemporary facial animation technologies in the context of biometrics, historical and cultural methods of measuring the human body and topographic mapping. It questions the power structures of measuring and mapping and how geography is constructed through ideologies. In the video, Christoph uses combinations of current 3D mapping and photogrammetry tools to (re)animate his own face. Digital prints explore notions of graphic projections that translate spatial data into flattened maps, intersecting digital UV maps, geographic information systems, acupuncture meridians and taxidermy. Christoph’s work ultimately highlights how people’s faces have become politically charged topographies.
Video, 3D Modelling, Animation, Wallpaper Design, Prints: Christoph Steger
VIDEO EXCERPT

Let Us Speak Frog (For Red Culebra)
McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco, CA Let Us Speak Frog; An experimental music performance with live animation and dance; collaboration with Red Culebra (synthesizer duet by electronic musicians and performance artists Guillermo Galindo and Cristóbal Martínez of Postcommodity), choreographer Gerald Casel, and dancers Audrey Johnson and Cauveri Suresh. Red Culebra invited me to collaborate in their ongoing project, a generative composition that speaks non-human languages and explores imagined ecologies. Using video game technology, I created a system of “playable” characters that move in response to strings attached to two old Playstation game controllers. During the live performance at McEvoy, two dancers operated the strings, generating a live animation performance of my characters that responded spontaneously to their physical movements. The combination of a large live animation projection, synthesizer performance, and dance created a ritualistic meditation that enthralled the audience for over an hour. I am particularly excited about the process of this collaboration where I didn’t control the animated movement but rather created a tool that gets activated by dancers (playeVisual Concept, 3D Models, Game Design: Christoph Steger
Concept and Music: Red Culebra (Guillermo Galindo, Cristóbal Martínez)
Choreography: Gerald Casel
Dancers: Audrey Johnson, Cauveri Suresh
VIDEO EXCERPT

Sonic Biogenesis (For Guillermo Galindo)
Shapeshifters Cinema, Oakland, CA 
“Post-Mexican”composer Guillermo Galindo asked me to become a collaborator in his evolving project “Sonic Biogenesis”. My work is a visual response to Galindo’s “genome scores” that consist of graphic representations of his musical compositions that merge textures of plants, animals, and microbes. These pieces illustrate, in Galindo’s unique symbolic language, how research and data have historically expressed and sustained systems of power, particularly relating to colonialism. Presently Sonic Biogenesis is a work in progress that includes instrument design, written compositions and performances by The Living Earth Show and animation by Christoph Steger. My animations are projected live during performances, incorporated into edited videos of performances and shown as standalone pieces in exhibitions. 

 Visual Concept, 3D Models, Animation: Christoph Steger
Composition: Guillermo Galindo
Music Performance: Guillermo Galindo, The Living Earth Show

PERFORMANCE EXCERPT

VIDEO EXCERPT
Jeffery and the Dinosaurs
Animate Projects, UKA film about a man whose struggle to overcome daily obstacles has produced an astonishing universe of outsider science fiction. Animation based on stories and drawings by Jeffery H. Marzi. Commisioned by Animate Projects for Animate TV (Channel 4 / Arts Council England).



Directed by: Christoph Steger
Animation: Christoph Steger, artwork by Jeffery H. Marzi
Produced by: Yasmeen Ismail
Music: Vasco Hexel
Additional Editing: Tony Fish
Additional Animation: Meghana Bisineer
FILM

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Mother
Royal College of Art, London, UK"Mother" is an undertaker. She has a loud voice, an expressionless face, and huge square glasses. The simplicity and directness with which she has been animated fits the robustness she exudes. For "Mother," it's no frills or smooth talk; you should grant the dead their peace. In an in-depth interview, she talks about her life among the dead with touching consideration. For example, she admits that she initially had to get used to their presence, but now she lives upstairs from them, "so they are not alone."

Directed by: Christoph Steger
Animation: Christoph Steger
Music: Vasco Hexel
Sound: Matthew Cooper
FILM

Eschaton Central
H&R Block Art Space, Kansas City, MO‘Eschaton Central’ is an experimental video collage that imagines the discovery of a lost archive of 21st century footage. Today’s state of the world is depicted in a documentary phantasma. Scenes of uninhabited spaces have been manipulated through re-videography and multiple exposure to envision the patina today’s images will acquire when viewed in the future. Using consumer electronics technology, these processes blur the boundaries between representation and abstraction. The film questions how we construct reality and imagines in what ways the current accumulation of pixel data will shape our collective memory. The piece’s structure is informed by Steger's personal experience of relocating from Europe to the American Midwest. Trying to understand this strange and foreign land has become an ongoing creative investigation and a source of inspiration. The solitude of urban life in a place that is surrounded by remnants of Cold War fortifications set the mood for a post-apocalyptic flight of fancy.

Written, Filmed, Directed by: Christoph Steger
Voice: Kim Noble
Music:John Atkinson
TRAILER

The Alhambra Project (with Lynn Marie Kirby)
The Alhambra Theatre, Russian Hill neighborhood, various locations, San Francisco, CA





A collaboration with Lynn Marie Kirby involving the Russian Hill community in San Francisco. The Alhambra Project was as a neighborhood-wide installation based around the former Alhambra Theatre, now a Crunch Gym, in San Francisco’s Russian Hill. The theater, built in 1926 as a movie palace, was inspired by the original Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain — an architectural wonder of the Moorish empire and a testament to the coexistence of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions in Europe.

The Alhambra Project combines an archive of neighborhood conversations with a series of video and performance pieces resulting from collaborations with artists from across the globe. Visitors are guided through the neighborhood with a smartphone app that activates the blocks surrounding the former Theater. The project illuminates layered site-specific history, exploring cultural patterning and visions of exoticism, while using the Theatre’s gym conversion as a locus for interrogating the shifting demographics of the neighborhood.

 Concept and Realisation: Lynn Marie Kirby & Christoph Steger
Geolocation App Design and Concept: Christoph Steger
Coding: Sam Elie
VIDEO DOCUMENTATION
VIDEO EXCERPTS
WEBSITE
©2024Christoph Steger