Via Lewandowsky: Weather lights (Illuminate)

At night, coloured, irregularly pulsating light can be seen flickering from afar from the upper room of the dark Taurastein Tower, which was built in 1912 as a lookout and water tower in Burgstädt. The flickering light from the tower's 16 arched windows was generated by multimedia artist Via Lewandowsky, who was born in Dresden in 1963 and now lives in Berlin, from sequences of feature films and documentaries that can be suggested via the website. Reduced to average values of colour temperature and brightness, at night 16 LED lamps emit a medial weather glow across the treetops of the Wettin Grove that is detached from the filmic narrative. During the day, the light installation is transformed by a sound collage. A four-digit numerical code, which is randomly generated on a display above the entrance to the tower, conveys a mysterious message to visitors as they enter the tower. The climb up the 163 steps into the lantern room is accompanied by coloured light and sounds: Sometimes it grumbles and trickles quietly, sometimes it thunders and cracks loudly. The sounds penetrate from a brick and tiled water tank, which was used as an elevated reservoir until 1996 and is now empty, via eight channels into the 39 metre high tower. The artist recorded and technically modified them underground in the former tin mine of the Ehrenfriedersdorf show mine, one of the oldest mining sites in the Erzgebirge mining region, some 40 kilometres away. They are now reflected in sound above ground at the height of the tower.

Lewandowsky's site-specific and conceptual light-sound installation is itself to be understood as a kind of spatialised film that can be experienced via many channels, levels and paths when entering the tower, climbing the steps, "watching television" from the viewing platform and also when looking at the flickering light at night. Stories and history, places and times of regional and media history are interwoven in such a way that the structure of sound and light creates an almost organic whole that communicates from head to toe and with all the senses of the visiting guests in the elongated body of the Taurasteintum.

(Text: Alexander Ochs / Ulrike Pennewitz)