Catalogue extract "Smile machines", transmediale06
Agnes Meyer-Brandis   SGM-Eisberg-Sonde / SGM-Iceberg-Probe 2005

In 1963 Sol LeWitt put down a few sentences about conceptual art, including this one: "Illogical judgements lead to new experiences". In the same text LeWitt says that artists are more mystics than rationalists. With her institute Research Raft for Subterranean Reefology, Agnes Meyer-Brandis is making a contribution to contemporary myth-building by searching for subterranean icebergs and other possible worlds. To this end she has developd an interactive apparatus whose strategic methodolgy is borrowed from science, but is otherwise a freely interpretative model of present-day-urban landscapes. Her concern is an old one: to learn something about the world. The technology is new: an elegant probe that can be lowered from an exploration tent into the earth's deeper layers and bring to light the unknown. Fictive and real information, in the form of moving images and sounds of subterranean life forms and rocks, are transmitted visually on a monitor next to the borehole and acoustically via headphones.