Fred Froehlich - FORMATION A

••• FMA, Page 01

Video Installation, 2007-2008
FORMATION A

FORMATION A is based on a simple scenario. In a laboratory situation of sorts, a fluid is subjected to forces that produce cyclical effects. The significantly decelerated course of movement follows mathematical laws described in the 13th century by the Italian mathematician Leonardo da Pisa, who discovered a number sequence that occurs in natural growth processes and which also underlies the wave theories of the economic and financial world.

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••• FMA, Page 02

"Fred Fröhlich's artistic work is focussed on 'everyday phenomena'. And what could be more everyday-like than water? Not only do we use water everyday to wash and drink; like other organisms, our bodies also consist of up to 60 to 70 percent water. Without water, life would be unthinkable. [...]

But Fröhlich's video is not about water, but rather the simulation of a fluid that has less to do with what comes out of the tap and more in common with the everyday images presented to us in TV commercials and the special effects we see in movies. Cameras struggle to capture the beauty and exact vérité of a stream of milk flowing into a bowl of cereal or a Tsunami washing over Manhattan. Software programmes, by contrast, imbue such scenes with a reality more real than real. The whole spectrum of parameters in the virtual world of filmic simulation is at the disposal of the artist striving to create the image of what it is visually expected. [...]

The everyday phenomena Fröhlich is seeking thus seem much more ubiquitous than was previously assumed. If there is a strange similarity between the seemingly natural wave movements of water and the cyclical dynamic of the stock market, then these waves of water reflect not only mathematical laws within a natural growth process - which Fröhlich shows, but also the phenomena of mass psychology, the expression of which is not only limited to the undulations of markets."

Ronald Berg in: Exhibition Room I / The Installed Room - the Collection of the KfW Bank Group, Frankfurt/Main, 2007