THE ARTIST
Michael Najjar belongs to that vanguard of artists who take a complex critical look at the technological forces shaping and drastically transforming the early 21st century. Najjar’s photo and video works exemplify and draw on his interdisciplinary understanding of art. He fuses science, art, and technology into visions and utopias of future social orders emerging under the impact of cutting-edge technologies. Born in 1966 in Landau, Germany, Najjar attended the bildo Academy of Media Art in Berlin from 1988 – 1993, where he was trained in the practices of conceptual and interdisciplinary art.
Najjar’s work constantly interrogates the relationship between reality and representation in the technical image. In his conceptual approach he magnifies the potential of the image through constant reconstruction of time and space for which he deploys a broad array of image processing techniques. Najjar’s pictorial language of form and content guides the viewer into a complex construction of simulated reality which is generated by the montage of multiple image sources and elements. He removes the photographic image from its historical viewing conventions and resituates it in a fundamentally new mode of perception.
THE WORK
Orbital Cascade_57–46 (2013)
The work Orbital Cascade_57–46 visualizes the demographics of defunct objects in orbit around the Earth from 1957 to 2046. This includes everything from spent rocket stages, and old satellites to fragments resulting from disintegration, erosion, and collisions. Currently there are about 600,000 objects larger than 1cm (0.4in) in space, orbiting Earth at a velocity of approximately 28,000 kmph (17,400 mph) and posing a severe threat to satellites, space stations and manned spaceflights. Drawn from a data archive, each spherule in the video represents a real existing object orbiting in space starting with the very first object in space, the Sputnik 1 satellite launched in 1957. 2013 marked the start of a simulated worst case future scenario that assumes two realistic collisions which would dramatically increase the amount of space debris, collisions known in aeronautics as the “cascade effect. The virtual camera flies up and down through various orbits, ending up deep in space looking down on Earth which will be entirely covered by space debris in the year 2046. The visualization was realized in collaboration with the Institute of Aerospace Systems @ TU Braunschweig, Germany.
Oscillating Universe (2015)
The work Oscillating Universe visualizes the “Big Bounce “theory which offers a hypothetical scientific model of the birth of our Universe. This theory draws on the idea of a cyclic or oscillatory universe which resulted during the Big Bang from the collapse of a previous universe. It argues that the Big Bang, which happened some 13.7 billion years ago, was the final big bang of a universe which existed before our own whose mass collapsed under the influence of gravity. Thus the Big Bang is no singularity but marks the beginning of a period of expansion following on from a period of contraction. According to the oscillatory universe theory, the Big Bang was simply the beginning of a period of expansion that followed a period when space contracted. This suggests that we could be living at any point in an infinite sequence of universes, or that our present Universe could be the first iteration of such a sequence.
The composition of the artwork Oscillating Universe draws on multiple super high-res data visualizations of distant galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope which have been digitally stitched to form a new fictive universe. This new universe has been inverted (reversal of black and white values) and supplemented with a matter-absorbing black hole. During the mounting of the final artwork, small metal particles were added which spread at random across the picture. These particles glitter like stars and vanish the next moment, depending on the lightning and the viewers’ perspective. They can be taken as a metaphor for the circle of life.