Text by CLOT Magazine
Right: Ephemera
Marcel Weber, better known as MFO, is a renowned German lighting and visual artist. Marcel has been creating and directing audiovisual performances, installations, and video works since 2001. His work has a very distinctive aesthetic concerned with memory and perception, and it highlights the architectural elements of performance spaces with powerful experimental visual narratives juxtaposing the work of some of the world’s most renowned electronic musicians. Marcel’s work lies between the analogue and the digital. Employing old media like projectors, film, and lenses against digital compositions and generative software.
Some of the artists he has collaborated with include Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tim Hecker (Ephemera), Ben Frost (Aurora Tour), and Kode9 (Her ghost, homage to Chris Maker’s la Jeté). Last year saw light his collaboration with Rolly Porter for the latest new show Third Law, inspired by solitary iced landscapes and which culminated in a blinding strobe crescendo.
During Unsound, he managed to find some free time in his busy schedule to chat with us just before the weekend got crazy – he is also the lighting designer for the whole festival, something he has been doing since almost the very beginning of the festival. Sitting outside bar Alchemia in Krakow’s lively Kazimierz Jewish quarter, we had time to go through his work and creative process and why his artistic practices take much on the crossover with technology and science.
After Unsound, we caught up again with Marcel in Berlin, where he told us about his many coming new projects: a collaboration with Liz Harris, aka Grouper, which took them to remote Siberian lands, and they will be presenting in this year’s edition of Unsound Krakow, a new tour and other surprising projects; it looks like a busy year ahead for Marcel, and we are eagerly waiting to see all his new exciting coming shows and performances.
