MUSEUM RITTER - Waltraud Cooper

Waltraud Cooper`s installation is the only work in the exhibition that is not tied to the Museum`s opening hours. It may be viewed on the outside of the buidling in the form of a square outline of light. With her choice of the square, the artist has taken the underlying theme of the Museum`s collection while simulaneously responding to the concept of architect Max Dudler, who has played a subtle game with this strict geometrical form - not only in the buidling as a whole but also in the individual facades.

This light square made from LED tubes has been tipped slightly to one side, so that three of its corners come in contact with the outermost bounds of the architectural form: the building`s upper and lower edges, as well as the opening to the passage. The square is lit up alternating blues and greens that follow a strictly logical system.

As in all of Cooper`s works from her series"Digital Poetry", which she has worked on since 1986, the colours are the visualization of a text that she has fed into a computer programme. Everything she enters into the computer is translated into a binary code consisting of zeros and ones. In this way, each letter is transformed into a sequence of numbers which, in the text stage, are assingned to the colours blue ("0") and green ("1"). The light square visualizes the name of the building, "Museum Ritter", in such a way that the duration of each colour correspondens to the number of zeros or ones within the sequence created for each particular letter. Thus "R" in Ritter is a rhytmical sequence of colours that corresponds to the code "10010".