Spielstrategien

Multimedia project from Karl Martin Holzhäuser and Gottfried Jäger (apparative graphics) und Walter Steffens (music). The german Nobel Prize winners Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler describe balance, growth and evolution in nature and in human society as a result of chance and law in their book, “The Game – Laws of Nature Control the Chance.”  These characteristics are also essential to games, such as dice games based on certain rules in which evolutionary processes can be simulated.  

The project focuses on the game strategy “selection” and conceives it through visual and musical means. It emerges as its own multimedia form. The premiere of the AV-production was on November 6, 1977 in the Fotomuseum Munich at the “Photography of Science” convention. Premier of the Live-Production with musicians and equipment in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld. Performers: Benedikta Bonitz (Recorder), Ursula Wüst (Flute), Peter Roggenkamp (Piano), Karl Martin Holzhäuser und Gottfried Jäger (Directors), Rolf Nackenhorst (AV Equipment), Walter Steffens (Conductor).

Based on the recording created in 1987, a 20-minute videotape in WDR-Trick Film Studio Cologne arose from Günter Richard and Karl-Wilhelm-Krämer, directed by Holzhäuser and Jäger. Premiere 1988 by the symposium Fotoinszenierungen – Contemporary Photography from the Federal Republic of Germany in Warsaw.

The game strategies were worked and expanded continually between 1977 and 1988. Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler wrote in a letter to the author in 1978: “We are fascinated to be working with evolutionary games artistically. The graphics … are very appealing. They meet the concerns of the book very well.”

Publication: Leonardo (Berkely), No. 4, 1991, p. 395-398, 400.