Isabelle Jenniches

Jenniches received her Master’s degree on scenography from the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna, and a postgraduate degree in Digital media, Communication and the Arts form Media-GN, Netherlands. Her work, often involving close collaborations, exploits the social and emotional impact of new forms of mediated communication in theatrical situations. In performances and photographic series, she draws from “low-tech” sources and the public or private webcam and found footage from the internet. Her work has been shown in the Grand Theater Groningen, Theater de Balie, Melkweg and Waag Society, Amsterdam; at DEAF, Dutch Electronic Arts Festival and at V2 in Rotterdam; Location one and Haverstworks, New York, and the World Wide Web.

While at Montalvo, Isabelle Jenniches prepared her collection of webcam images of the volcano Iwate in Japan for the exhibition “Topographic” at SPACES in Cleveland, Ohio. Made between August 2001 and June 2002, the stills capture the austere beauty of the mountain face as it changes in color and light due to weather, seasons and time of day. In a video montage these slow transformations are being contrasted with a surge of found footage from the internet illustrating the events of those months: a dense mix of family snapshots, pictures of manga characters, cars and flow charts as well as news coverage of the unfolding “war on terror”. Against the backdrop of daily life in an atmosphere of fear and confusion, the picture of a volcano omitting plumes of smoke seems serene by comparison, making the act of gazing at a mountain unshaken by world events a therapeutic ritual.

Additionally, Isabelle received a grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture for the development of a custom robotic webcam interface to explore possibilities of online narrative and collective storytelling.