a. Sleeping Venuses are waking up
b. The computer as component/opponent
c. The apple as temptation

If you would have entered the room of the gallery space "the embassy" in 1990 in Berlin, shortly after the wall came down, you would have seen installation #4435-The Artist is Present, created by me, Regina Frank:

A simple desk with a computer, six gold framed black and white images on the left wall, one black framed image on the front wall and facing the desk, a window looking out to the old building of the post museum, directly across the street.
The images on the left wall were paintings reproduced in black and white on photosensitized linen. These black and white paintings were reproductions of Giorgione and Tizian, women, venuses, lounging on sofas or in the grass.
The last frame on the facing wall is a photograph showing me working on a Macintosh classic (attractive to me because of it's name the apple classic or the classic apple), naked at a working desk. You see me manipulating the scanned Giorgione's and Tizian's and cropping the original painting by squeezing it into a DIN Format A4 (which is a standard letter format in Germany). But you might have been confused had you returned the following day everything would be the same except one image the one showing me sitting at my desk was suddenly different, this time it showed me dressed confronting the viewer.
I was alternating every day these particular images, once showing me naked and with my head towards the computer and once dressed with my eyes directed to the viewer. In the hallway there was a needle point printer, printing a catalogue, publishing a "Spiegel-Gespräch" a talk with the mirror or the magazine "Der Spiegel".

The computer, as component and opponent, the computer as a mirror, had become my partner of dialogue, my assistant to control an image that is being projected on women since centuries, represented through their clothing, their outfit, their look or movements. Following the development of these paintings by Giorgione and his student Tizian, you see that the women in the center of the paintings, are slowly awaking, getting more and more involved with their surrounding.

The environment is changing from Nature ( in Giorgione's sleeping Venus) into a more and more artificial surrounding with cupid, painting in the back, furniture etc. Between Giorgione and me, more than 24 generations apart from each other, women's development from a general role of the muse to the artist has taken place and the influence of the computer on womankind/mankind in general, as well as to the arts and to writing is not be underestimated. Or as Paul Virilio put it in 1980 "together with women's liberation came the temptation of technology" (in my case the temptation was the Apple classic).

Fortsetzung folgt...to be continued tomorrow