about

what and who is and-or.ch?

and-or is an artgroup specializing in media art and gameArt. The group consists of René Bauer, Beat Suter and Mirjam Weder. The group operates since 2001 from Zurich, Switzerland.

and-or explores new modes of interactivity and concreativity between machines and their human users. Simple but distinct concepts become game prototypes or playful media art. Digital data is everywhere these days but its impact often is not considered. We make this data and its impact visible to everyone, we question it and open up a discourse on digital boundaries.

For this purpose we often use feeds of constant ideas and thoughts (digital readymades) as found in searchengines, feeds of publicly available texts, pictures and sounds and various behaviour-patterns of gameplay. If set into a playful perspective, these can easily show you what lies beneath the digital surface and beyond the common limits of communication. In other words, we try to deconstruct processes and use the fragments to build artworks into small systems that develop into new systems of meaning.

awards

// In 2003 the work "the famous sound of absolute wreaders" in which and-or collaborated with 5 other authors, received the public award for "literatur.digital" in t-online's digital writing contest.

// In 2006 and-or's work streamfishing received an award from ars electronica in the category Net Vision for mapping a collective subconscious via users input in search-engines.

// In 2009 and-or's work wardive received three nominations for the mobile award of the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco: as best mobile game, as innovaton in mobile game design and in the category technical achievement.

// In 2013 and-or's game nanorunners was a finalist for the Swiss Game Award by the Swiss Game Developers Association SGDA.

origin

and-or's origin is the e-poetry and the media art scene. some of our projects like wardive, sniff_jazzbox and andorDada are media art projects created for mobile devices. they capture and transpose communication waves between humans and machines into adaptive and locative games, music or poetry.

andorDada creates a poem that adapts itself to the area of town you walk through and weaves your friend's names into the poem. sniff_jazzbox transposes areas of a town via names of hotspots in music and generally creates an audible city. wardive finally is the game version: while walking or driving through town, hotspots become enemies and need to be fended off quickly before they destroy your cristal.

selected interviews

> an interview with and-or on de-fictionalising the "technical subconscious" (2007) (OMG Nintendo) (pdf).
> an interview with and-or on gamescape, laichenberg and discrimination pong (gamescenes.org) (2011) [pdf].
> an interview with and-or about andorDada and DadaOverload (2017) (KVB Boekwerk) (pdf).

selected shows

# edinburgh 2012: inspace, university, remediating the social, elmcip, nov. 1 - 17. -- Searchsonata 181
# karlsruhe 2013: zkm medienmuseum, zkm_gameplay, from june 21, permanent. -- Laichenberg
# sao paolo 2017: Fiesto Cultural Center, FILE Media Art; FILE 2017, july - august. -- DadaOverload
# kassel 2019: kunsttempel, POESIS. Sprachkunst/ Language Art, august 29 - october 6. -- Please, don't touch me!

in collections

# javamuseum 2005 - extasy! the final show. perth, cologne 2005. -- streamfishing
# javamuseum 2010 - celebrate! forum for internet technology in contemporary art. cologne 2010. -- searchSongs
# elmcip anthology of european electronic literature. karlskrona 2013. -- andorDada
# electronic literature organzation, the electronic literature collection, volume 3. ISSN: 1932-2016, cambridge, massachusetts 2016. -- searchsonata 181
# electronic literature organzation, the electronic literature collection, volume 4. e-ISSN: 1932-2022, vamcouver, washington 2022. -- please, don't touch me!

recent

In the recent projects dadaOverload and please, don't touch me! we merged artgame and e-poetry aspects further and played with bots, ai and generated statements that become well-integrated parts of distinct mechanics of games. while dadaOverload is a twitter-text-shooter, please don't touch me is a game about the routine of harrassing avatars and ai in games, apps and internet.

both recent works show that text is a very important element in and-or's works. the interface between communication and play, between human and machine and human, receives our utmost attention. as a result text is used on different levels: as code, as algorithm, as a statement, as natural and as artificial language. this again creates streams of data of which only individual segments are perceived. the player/user gets a different view of these data streams, might get a glimpse of invisible structures and may recognize expressions and feedbacks and behaviours. in other words: it offers different ways of interacting with subconscious streams of language and behaviour feedbacks.

group's artists

and-or is: rené bauer, beat suter and mirjam weder

# rené bauer is lecturer for gamedesign at zhdk.ch, manager of gamelab zhdk, developer of tha collaborative writing platforms nic-las.com, tEXtmachina, iMachina, iXistenZ and various independent games. he founded and-or together with beat suter. >more at zhdk gamedesign

# beat suter is lecturer for gamedesign at zhdk.ch, manager of gamelab zhdk, concepter of iMachina, creator of IdeasForGames and author and publisher of edition cyberfiction and various books. he founded and-or together with rené bauer. >more at zhdk gamedesign; >more at zhdk; >more from cybersuter

# mirjam weder is a writer, concepter and lecturer of linguistics at unibas.ch and spcializes in writing research, advanced writing development and computer-based analysis of language usage and writing processes. >more at uni basel

# in 4 projects and-or has been collaborating with the stuttgart artist johannes auer, who has been developing e-poetry since 1994 and organized several international festivals on literature and electriciy (literatur und strom) over the years. >more on netzliteratur.net