Waltraut Cooper, A Digital Signature: Blue Lines, 2008. Installation view at Palazzo Mora, 2016.

A Digital Signature
Waltraut Cooper, a pioneer of digital art, has created a „room of light“ under the title „A DIGITAL SIGNATURE“ in the Palazzo Mora for the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2016.
This is the continuation of a series of works which display a fascinating poetic power, beginning of the 80's, when this region between art and the digital media, combining artistic sensitivity and the rapidly expanding digital technology in a fruitful dialogue, was „terra incognita“.
Cooper’s training in mathemats, theoretical pgysisics and art made it natural for her to choose a synthesis of analytic thinking and creative work as her favorite theme combining art with mathematics, architecture and light.
Cooper’s most recent contribution to the Biennale is again a work of clarity which continues her international series of light installations on the façades of museums and iconic buildings in a vast public space, transforming the nocturnal scene by imposing a digital signature, made all the more striking by this strict reduction to essentials.
„A DIGITAL SIGNATURE“ is part of the series „DIGITAL POETRY“ which commenced at the Venice Biennale 1986/Art and Science in which various artistic forms of expression – linguistic, visual and musical – were connected directly via binary code and computer which could be manipulated by the visitors.
As in the case of her present contribution, many of her installations are based on mathematical series and constructions, often using digitalised versions of names or themes as a starting point.
In this case the installation consists of a room illuminated by a digitalised version of the artist’s name in the language of the future written in light, her favourite medium.
Cooper has persued her artistic vision and carved out her incividual niche with a series of digital creations encoded in various forms which represent a challenging synthesis of free poetry and strict encodement, of playfulness and strict rule, of analogue sensitivity and digital construction.
Based on texts by Heide Hagebölling, Cologne and Rosa Maria Plattner, Vienna.