EGO
Klaus Obermaier
In psychology the mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of a conflict between one's perceived visual appearance and one's emotional experience. This identification is what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called alienation.
The interactive installation EGO re-stages and reverses the process of alienation by enhancing and deforming the mirror image by the movements of the users. Although an abstraction, it quickly becomes the self and reestablishes the tension between the real and the symbolic, the Ego and the It, the subject and the object.
Credits
Klaus Obermaier
with Stefano D’Alessio and Martina Menegon
Klaus Obermaier
For more than three decades interdisciplinary artist, director and composer Klaus Obermaier creates innovative works with new media in performing arts, music and installations, highly acclaimed by critics and audience.
His inter-media performances and artworks are shown at festivals and theaters throughout Europe, Asia, North and South America and Australia. Many of his projects, such as D.A.V.E, APPARITION, LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS, DANCING HOUSE or EGO, are considered groundbreaking and genre-defining for the development of new artistic forms of human interaction with digital systems.
Klaus Obermaier is visiting professor at the University IUAV of Venice/Italy and at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca/Romania teaching interactive arts and performances. He taught as an adjunct professor for composition at the Webster University Vienna and held courses for choreography and new media at the Accademia Nazionale di Danza di Roma. From 2016 to 2018 he was co-director of the Master for Advanced Interaction at IAAC (institute for advanced architecture of Catalonia) in Barcelona/Spain. He gives lectures and has been invited as a keynote speaker at many international festivals, conferences and institutions.
