BIOGRAPHY
Ralf Baecker (*1977 Düseseldorf, Germany) is an artist working at the interface of art, science and technology. Through installations and machines, Baecker explores fundamental mechanisms of new media and technologies. In his representations and specializations of digital and technological processes he offers a poetic sight behind the surfaces of contemporary image making. At the core of his objects lies the entanglement of the virtual with the real, or rather, with the world. With a media-archaeological outlook, Ralf Baecker digs within obsolete devices for traces and functions that are still detectable in technologies today. His work seeks to form a hybrid between contemporary digital methods and a pre-enlightenment form of thinking. As a result, he understands technology not as a tool but rather as an epistemological instrument, in order to pose elemental questions about a world perceived through technological impressions.
Baecker has been awarded multiple prizes and grants for his artistic work, including the grand prize of the Japan Media Art Festival in 2017, an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2012 and 2014, the second prize at the VIDA 14.0 Art & Artificial Life Award in Madrid, a working grand of the Stiftung Kunstfond Bonn, the Stiftung Niedersachsen work stipend for Media Art 2010 and the stipend of the Graduate School for the Arts from the University of the Arts in Berlin and the Einstein Foundation.
His work has been presented in international festivals and exhibitions, such as the International Triennial of New Media Art 2014 in Beijing, Künstlerhaus Wien, ZKM | Center for Art and New Media in Karlsruhe, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, WINZAVOD Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, Laboral Centro de Arte in Gijon, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB), NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, Kasseler Kunstverein and Malmö Konsthall.
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