Tim Otto Roth

Tim Otto Roth is a conceptual artist and composer who travels between Hanoi, Rome, Paris and New York with site-specific commissioned productions. As with his first solo presentation at the ZKM, he repeatedly integrates public space: In winter 2004/05, the 100-day large-scale projection of “Imachinations”, an ongoing ephemeral digital image series based on the circle number Pi, which he also presented at a research station on Spitzbergen, at the mumok in Vienna and at the Library of Alexandria, among others, appeared at Kubus Subraum.  
More recently, the Black Forest native has increasingly focused his attention on the complexity of non-linear systems, such as those found in climate models, cellular automata or biological nervous systems. He is not interested in understanding the underlying models in detail, but rather in developing a cybernetic sensorium for interactions and feedback in network-like contexts that always reveal the unpredictable and unpredictable. He demonstrates that this is possible without explicit mathematical knowledge using a millennia-old textile artifact: a knotted piece, which he is also presenting at the “Fellow Travelers” exhibition. In collaboration with Indian carpet weavers, the color combination of the knots in the next row is generated performatively using a simple neighborhood rule - without a template, patterns emerge “by themselves” that defy the imagination. He also transfers the principles of self-organization to the medium of sound, for example when he has pipes play a water organ according to this principle or, as in “Sonapticon” 2012, transforms the loudspeakers of the ZKM Sound Dome into a neural network that communicates via sounds.
In his sound-based works, he emphasizes the spatiality of the auditory experience by physically placing numerous luminous sound bodies designed by his studio in the space or even setting them in rotation above the audience, as in the ethereal presentation of the “Heaven's Carousel” 2015 at the Globale on Friedrichsplatz in Karlsruhe. The space is thus transformed into an additive synthesizer whose sound experience changes 'interactively' as you walk through it, in which the tones of the distributed sound sources mix to create site-specific sounds. The colored glow reinforces the physical presence of the sound ensemble and expands it into an electro-acoustic music theater.
In addition to his exploration of spaces, which he rediscovers in the supposedly flat world of shadows, Roth has been focusing on invisible and barely tangible natural phenomena for over 20 years. His expanded form of land art developed from this ranges from his expansive installations as visual and sonic spaces of experience, which allow us to experience the exposure of the earth in space through the cosmic radiation surrounding us, to the wooden distance and media sculpture NATUR, which explores the relationship between culture and nature in the rural area of the Black Forest.
In addition to his artistic work, Roth also holds a doctorate in art and science history. This connection between the two cultures is not only reflected in his own academic publications, curated exhibitions such as “Schatten im Blick?” at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne (2018) and international research collaborations. His plea for a physics of art that emphasizes the material and physical as a source of knowledge is always understood as building bridges to a wide variety of scientific fields.

[Oktober 2024]