Floor piece: 6400 square floor tiles, each 25 x 25 cm, total expanse 20 x 20 m, Floor paint in different colours: 14 shades of blue, 20 shades of grey as well as white and black.

Links: https://gpn.greenpeace.de/ausgabe/0318/mosaik-fuers-klima/ Interview Magazin Bundeskunsthalle / WDR 5 Radio, Scala, Kulturmagazin, Jörg Mayer, WDR / TV: Franca Schön / Kunstforum International / Generalanzeiger Bonn, Heidrun Wirth / 

Parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which takes place in Bonn in November 2017, and the exhibition Weather Report – About Weather Culture and Climate Science at the Bundeskunsthalle, the artist Achim Mohné presents a thematically related, large-scale work in the forecourt of the Bundeskunsthalle.Mohné transposes Earthrise, the world-famous photograph of planet earth, fromdigital space into the physical space of the museum forecourt, by aligning thedigital pixels of the image with a corresponding number of concrete floor tiles.He thus recreates a digital image as an analogue, large-scale mosaic composed of6400 square floor tiles. When seen at ground level, the image is unrecognisableand apparently abstract, but it becomes readable as a pixelated image of earth inaerial photographs and satellite images. The 6400 pixels, each 25 x 25cm in sizeand adding up to an area of 20 x 20 metres, correspond to a digital cameraresolution of just 0.0064 megapixels.Although the floor piece appears not to be aligned with its surroundings, it issituated on a north-south axis so that it is perpendicular to the grid of virtualmaps and appears ‘upright’ on virtual globes. The analogue low-tech format is not recognised by digital spam filters and thus adopted into the data pools ofvirtual globes such as Google Earth or Apple Maps, which will spread the dataworldwide. With the next Google Earth or Apple Maps update, the ‘new’ imagewill become visible as ‘earth in space’ seen from space.Earthrise is an analogue colour photograph taken by astronaut Bill Anders on 24December 1968 during a lunar orbit of the American Apollo 8 mission. Hailed as‘the most influential environmental photograph ever taken’, it was published inthe news magazine Time in January 1969. This pioneering photograph takenfrom space – and others like it – were the first to bring home the thinness ofearth’s atmosphere and to highlight the fragility and vulnerability of our planet.Just a few week later, David Bowie wrote his famous song Space Odyssey:‘For heream I sitting in a tin canfar above the worldplanet earth is blueand there’s nothing I can do …’Bowie drew on the image, which has since acquired iconic status and becomefirmly rooted in our collective memory, as a starting point for his own reflectionsand to take a stand. Like Bowie, Mohné investigates questions of proximity anddistance, inside and outside, up and down, strange and familiar. His use ofreversals, filters, adaptations and irritations prompts the viewer to take a closerlook. And in times of ‘fake news’, the question of the truthfulness and power ofimages – or words – is crucial and acts as an appeal to the viewer’s criticalfaculties. Every change of one’s position, one’s point of view, transforms the(analogue) abstraction into a (digital) concreteness – and vice versa. This sociopoliticalstatement reminds each and every one of us of our responsibility. Themore we engage with something that we initially don’t understand and the morewe look at it from different angles, the more we will eventually get out of ourdawning deeper understanding. And it is for this reason that this work is anappeal to be attentive and mindful in the way we treat each other and our planet. Text: Susanne Kleine /About: WDR 5 Radio, Scala, Kulturmagazin / Jörg Mayer, WDR TV / Franca Schön Interview Magazin Bundeskunsthalle