Walter Giers (1937–2016) is acclaimed as one of the pioneers of electronic art. With his interactive play objects and ingenious sound and light works, he followed in the tradition of constructivism, kinetic art, and light art. Yet Walter Giers was a self-taught artist. In 1959, the trained metal engraver and versatile jazz musician moved to Schwäbisch Gmünd, where he initially worked as an industrial designer. Driven by his enthusiasm for aesthetic, acoustic, and technological questions, in the late 1960s he took electronic components to create his first purpose-free works, which he described as “nonsense designs” or “play objects.” The use of random generators from 1973 onwards became a turning point for him: from then on his objects developed a life of their own and could enter into a complex mutual relationship with the audience.

Walter Giers’s pictorial objects, sculptures, and installations appeal directly to our senses of sight, hearing, and touch. On encountering his works we feel surprised, amused, relaxed, or sometimes even baffled or emotionally overwhelmed. So Just do it! is Walter Giers’s invitation to the audience to abandon its passive role and interact with the objects. The slogan also expresses the self-image of an artist who developed his “playful communication tools” less through inspiration than by tinkering, trial and error, and experimentation.