Jeffrey Shaw

23 October 1944, Melbourne, Australia.
1963 Architecture at the University of Melbourne
1964 Art History at the University of Melbourne
1965 Sculpture at the Brera Academy of Art, Milan
1966 Sculpture at St Martins School of Art, London
1970–1980 Founding member of THE EVENTSTRUCTURE RESEARCH GROUP
1989 Guest professor at the Academy of Art, Rotterdam
1990 Guest professor at the Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam
Since 1991, director of the INSTITUTE FOR VISUAL MEDIA at the ZKM CENTER FOR ART AND MEDIA TECHNOLOGY in Karlstruhe.
Some of the selected works are:
The Legible City (with Drink Groeneveld) Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht 1988
Alice’s Rooms ‘International Art & Science Exhibition’, Kawasaki 1989
The Virtual Museum ‘Das Belebte Bild’, Art Frankfurt, Frankfurt 1991
Disappearance ‘The Binary Era’, Musee d’Ixelles, Bruxelles 1992
EVE ‘MultiMediale 3’, ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe 1994

The age old tension between transcendental and material truths which problematizes any physical embodiment as a potential idolotary could be resolved in the realm of immaterial representation. My recent work THE GOLDEN CALF allows a worshipful object to renounce its iconoclastic corporeal form, and so become an appropriate empyrean archetype in the televirtual ether. The viewers’ dance around this naked pedestal proclaims that the ‘emperor without clothes’ has arrived – he is the great gun of our time and we exult in the promiscuously heterogeneous fineries of his cyber-attire.

The Golden Calf 1994

Produced at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology Karlsruhe
Application software - Gideon May
Hardware - Sharp LCD screen, Polhemus Fastrak, Silicon Graphics computer. First shown at the Ars Electronica, Linz, 1994