Spuller
statement
The choice of media and materials in art knows no bounds. The ends of individual expression justify the means, even those beyond the known conventions of artistic jargon.
In the case of Michael Spuller, who in a previous life was a draftsman, business consultant, and construction method specialist, the medium chosen is a well-known Microsoft spreadsheet and charting program called "Excel".
As an artist, Spuller ventures an interesting "borrowing" with this unusual medium. In linguistics, the term "borrowing" refers to the creative transfer of words or syntactic structures from one language to another in order to more efficiently express ideas, experiences, feelings and much more. Michael Spuller challenges the language system of the "spreadsheets" designed by Dan Bricklin in the late 1970s to a grand semantic leap. In a program intended to order the world in numerical values, the artist redesigns, cell by cell, the immense Alpine landscape experienced, photographed and thus internalized en plain air.
As the name suggests, the "spreadsheets" can be extended indefinitely. They are therefore suitable for imagining the landscape indefinitely. The rock walls constructed with the Excel pencil are indeed an artistic representation, but at the same time a wealth of encrypted numerical codes with a virtual existence anchored in the program at the time the drawing was created. Other surprising added values result from this new application of the software. Spuller's meticulous, yes, in a certain sense, technoid interpretation of nature stands in an interesting field of tension with the free variations that can arise from his artistic examination of the landscape in digital space. In their material execution using prints on canvas and wood, the microscopic structure of the rocks in the “Mountain Moments” touches us in contrast to the monochromatic purity of the sky.