CHRISTIAN MOELLER
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CONCEPTUAL DESIGN
ARTWORK DESCRIPTION
Christian Moeller’s work, The Baggage Handlers, depicts the faces of four airport operation workers. The artwork recognizes these workers as part of the largely invisible manual labor force at work within the machine-like reality of air cargo and travel. Despite the increasingly complex computerized nature of air travel, the operation workers serve as a reminder that some tasks are still thus far beyond mechanization. Rendered from photographs of the subjects, Moeller created their portraits for the bit-wall using wood. The artwork consists of two 75’ x 12’ panels, set flush against the stone wall in the airport ticket hall.
ARTWORK IN-PROGRESS
Images from left to right:
Before beginning fabrication, the artist built a 12’ x 4’ foot model. The depicts a small section of one of the portraits in the artwork; the artwork before being shipped to the site for installation; the artwork is like a giant puzzle – created with over 4,000 strips of individually cut wood – no two alike. The pieces will be put together on site in a process that will take 20 days.
The two images above show installation in progress as installers on lifts are placing individual strips of wood onto Christian Moeller's artwork.
COMPLETED ARTWORK (One of two walls)
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Christian Moeller works with contemporary media technologies to produce innovative and intense physical events, realized from handheld objects to architectural scale installations. Spanning the past two decades, his body of work represents investigations of what can be revealed by the intersections of cinema, computation, music, and physical space. His installations span the globe—Tokyo, London, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, London, New York City, Seattle, and many more. Moeller is a Professor in the Department of Design and Media Arts at UCLA. He studied architecture at the College of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In 1990 he founded his own studio and media laboratory in Frankfurt. He was a professor at the State College of Design in Karlsruhe, Germany until he moved to the United States in the year 2001.
The artist posed in front of the to-scale model.
ARTIST WEBSITE
