I use the term [situ art] to refer to art created at or in relation to a specific place ("in situ"). However, these projects at public places like airports, railway stations or office buildings don’t portrait concrete venues but rather capture the essence of a situation: a gathering of people linked by common goals or interests and the desire to communicate with each other and their surroundings.
I'm reluctant to call his work photography as I abandon the methods that have defined the medium in the art world: Instead of using a camera to create a picture out of a deliberately chosen frame of reality, capturing the composition in that notorious “decisive moment” I use a form of robotic image acquisition. I usually set up a camera very much like a scientific experiment, to obtain technically optimized input, triggering the shutter automatically whenever suitable subjects enter the field of view. Those images, typically recorded by the thousands during the first stage of a project are the building blocks for a different kind of creation.
Primarily, those pictures exist as concepts. The physical incarnation of [situ art] requires a third stage, the creation of a view of the virtual space in real space. These views take the form of large-format media designed for a particular location. Those works are unique to the site, not only adapted by format and media but rather individually composed from the concepts’ templates.
Treating those images as a stream of more or less interchangeable raw material, I re-interpret reality by re-mapping the serial images into two-dimensional space. The pictures created during this second stage usually reduce the original place to a few, often abstract, features revealing the human dimension even more clearly: People performing seemingly mysterious rites – riding escalators and elevators, climbing enigmatic stairs, traversing unfathomable spaces.