HotLittlePool

Hot Little Pool

You prepared a site-specific mural work for the first exhibition with Hot Little Pool at Lobe Block. Could you speak a bit about the concept of it and digital processes you used to create the image?

Manuel Resch and Maximilian Maria Willeit

We used a text-to-image generator to create an image based on a text we wrote. Hot Little Pool asked us to make a mural for the exhibition in December, it was a big outside wall, about 7 x 7 meters. Since we have been incorporating text and letters in our work we decided to shift the text to image relation in the means of a billboard. To enhance sizing we translated the image into a relief which was then rendered in a cinematic program with certain settings.

HLP

So, do you basically conceive text-to-image generation with AI-algorythms or 3d-Extruding as kind of another “brush”, like a tool for creative process? Or is it more coming through as a co-creator, collaborator – a third “artist” to your duo?

MR & MMW

We do not consider them as a brush, but as tools, as much as a brush is a tool.

HLP

Lil Internet famously said in conversation with Metahaven and Kate Cooper, that “VR begins to function like an augmentation of reality, rather then a separate space — we are the closest to true hyperreality (in terms of the elimination of a divide between reality an simulation) that we’ve ever been, and Trump, post-fact, etc., are all growing pains of society’s transition from reality to this hyperreality”. Do you see the transformations you perform with images through AI, Rendering, Printing and folding on the physical canvases — as a step forward to simulation and back again to the real, as kind of reflecting those changes?

MR & MMW

We are very invested in these ideas. In our work we try to form coherences, we use space, tools, materials and time to create new paintings.

HLP

What is your favorite printing technique right now?

MR & MMW

We do like sublimation printing.

HLP

Can you relate to the concepts like “bad painting” or “cursed aesthetics”? What is your emotional relation to an image, while working with?

MR & MMW

We can not relate to the term bad painting. There is no emotional relation evoked while or through working, but of course we also react emotionally to images.

HLP

We have just seen, you are building a 3D-Printer (CNC?), what are you planning to do with it?

MR & MMW

We do have printers and are currently building a cnc. There is no planned usage yet. For now we are just interested in building it.

We do not rely on classical parameters as such but are interested in the history of painting and color.

HLP

Do you use found material ? If yes, how much found image material is important to you? Is there a need to “elevate” some motives through decontextualising them? Do you rely on the classical ideas of paintings being still lives, portraits, historical paintings, abstract paintings and so on?

MR & MMW

We do use found material, structurally but also in terms of imagery. There is no need to elevate them, we do both, use raw material and alter or assemble it i.e. as stages. Much happens through translation. We do not rely on classical parameters as such but are interested in the history of painting and color.

HLP

Would a painting without a composition possible? Do you actually think about composition, when working?

MR & MMW

We do think about composition, but try not to limit ourselves.

HLP

Do you often have paint on your fingers? Are you sometimes angry at a painting, do you destroy some paintings?

Our fingers are dirty all the time.

HLP

Is there some kind of basic organizational structure when positioning a motive on the canvas or finding a one technical solution to a series of works?

MR & MMW

We do set parameters during certain processes. Working together means verbalizing. There is no structure that gets repeatedly celebrated, we are not interested in positioning motifs on canvases but making paintings.

HLP

The Studio you currently work in is bright and quite big. Are you often changing studios because of the situation or for the change of working processes?

MR & MMW

We do change the space and the surrounding to the output we want. Different environments generate different possibilities.