Rene Bauer and Beat Suter AND-OR

AND-OR
René Bauer and Beat Suter

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. René Bauer and Beat Suter work as professors for game design at the University of the Arts Zurich, Switzerland.

AND-OR explores new forms of interactivity and creativity between machines and their human users. Simple but independent concepts are turned into game prototypes or playful language and media art. Digital data are everywhere today, but their effects are often not taken into account. AND-OR's principle is to make this data and its effects visible to everyone, to question them and thus open up a discourse across digital boundaries. For this purpose we use (linguistic) feeds of ideas and thoughts (digital ready-mades) as they can be found in search engines - feeds of publicly available images and sounds and real-time data of gameplay behavior patterns. In a playful and simple way, these streams are able to show what is going on under the digital surface and go beyond the usual boundaries of communication. In the process, a development towards ever greater abstraction and extreme transposition of the invisible data can be observed in the works, which goes hand in hand with the increasing and less manageable information flows of our time.